' A \ ^ A .-- ^ «5^ THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OF PHILOSOPHY The Nature of Human Brain Work Letters on Logic. The Positive Outcome of Philosophy JOSEPH DIETZGEN TRANSLATED BY ERNEST UNTERMANM WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY DR. ANTON PANNEKOEK TRANSLATED BY ERNEST UNTERMANN Edited by Eugene Dietzgen and Joseph Dietzgbk, Jr. CHICAGO CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY 1906 LIBRARY of C ONGRESS Two Copies CC1 Received i 1906 (C<- I ft. '0 in making the same use of it as a clergyman who tries to prove that his theology is innate in reason. Our conception of logic wishes to show that all causes and effects are matter of the same kind, and that our faculty of reasoning is a matter of fact thing which brooks no mysteries or metaphysical dreams. SIXTEENTH LETTER Now let me illustrate the interconnection of all things, or the world-unit, by discussing the question of causality. We know that everything has its cause. We know that this is also true on the Moon or on Uranus, although we have not acquired this knowledge by experience on those world bodies. Thus it seemed that the intellect was a mysterious receptacle containing innate wisdom. The same receptacle also contains, for instance, the truth that all white horses are white and all black horses black. We do not know anything about the color of other horses in other countries, but the color of black and white horses we know even if we have never seen them in other coun- tries. It is thus apparent that our intellect is an instru- ment which reaches beyond experience. For this reason there would seem to be no telling where the supply of such miraculous revelations would stop and into what mysterious worlds the intellect passing beyond the limits of experience would lead us. In order that the human intellect may not appear transcendental, in order to give it its place in the general classification of natural forces, we must investigate the nature of causality and so-called a priori knowledge. 266 LETTERS ON LOGIC Kindly observe in the first place that a thing is just as wonderful after it is explained as it was before its ex- planation. A scientific explanation of a thing ought not to do away with our admiration, but only to reduce it to reasonable bounds. The intellect may very well be re- garded as something wonderful, but its wondrous quality should be reduced to the measure of all things which are none of them any less wonderful. After you have ex- plained what water is, after you have learned that it is composed of two chemical elements, after you have real- ized all its qualities thoroughly, it still remains a wonder- ful, divine, fluid. "All things have their causes." What are all things? They are attributes, qualities of the universe. It is innate in the intellect to know that the world is one thing, that all things belong, not to any different thing, but to one and the same subject. The intellect is by nature the abso- lute feeling of unity. It knows of itself that everything is interrelated and that the consciousness of causality is nothing'else but the consciousness of cosmic interrelation. And I maintain that the innateness of the consciousness of cosmic interrelation in our brain is explained when we realize that it is an actual thing like all others, a phenom- enon which has the same general nature as every other phenomenon.* The fact is undeniable that a certain knowledge is in- nate in our consciousness. The only difficulty has been to explain this fact. At this point I call your attention to the exaggerated notion entertained in regard to explain- ing, and understanding, things. By explanations, a thing is not dissolved, but only classified. The hatching of an egg is explained when you per- *e. g. That of natural existence. — Editor. LETTERS ON LOGIC 267 ceive that this process is part and parcel of a whole class of similar processes. If you modify the exalted idea of the effect of explanations in this sense, you must realize that the innate consciousness of the general in- terrelation of things is natural and intelligible and re- quires no other explanation than the humidity of the water, the gravity of bodies, or the color of black horses. Even after it has been explained and understood, the intellect with its logic remains a wonderful thing. Just as clay is by its nature untransparent and pliable, or glass transparent and brittle, so consciousness has its peculiar innate qualities. In this way knowledge comes to the in- tellect not only by experience, but it is also a sort of re- ceptacle full of wisdom. Still this receptacle would no more contain wisdom without experience than the eye would have impressions without light. In order to straighten out the intricate windings of our subject, I recapitulate them. We wish to learn the proper use of our intellect, the conscious application of consciousness. To this end we analyze its hitherto hidden mystical nature. So long as we exalt this nature trans- cendentally to the clouds, we do not acquire its proper use. Therefore the first paragraph of our lesson reads: The intellect belongs in the same category with all things of the universe. And the second paragraph says : If we distinguish two classes of thought radiated by the human intellect, viz., innate thoughts, such as causality, and on the other hand thoughts which come through experience, we must remember that such a distinction is correct only when we realize that in spite of this classification in two kinds they really belong to the same kind. Innate and acquired wisdom, though served on two different plates, still are taken from the same general world dish. 268 LETTERS ON LOGIC From this it follows that the science of causality, though applicable to all the phenomena of the world, does not apply to the universe. If it is a fact that all wisdom is worldly, then one must not fly outside of the world with the concept of causality. This is the salient point at issue. All things are one thing, are interdependent, stand in the relation of cause and effect toward one another, or of genus and species. To say that all things have a cause means that they have a mother. The fact that every mother has a mother finds its final ending in the world mother or mother world, which is absolute and mother- less and contains all mothers in its womb. Causes are mothers, effects are daughters. Every daughter has not only a mother, grand-mother, and great- grand-mother, but also a father, grand-father, and great- grand-father. The origin, or the family relationship, of a daughter is not one-sided, but all-sided. In the same way all things have not one, but many causes which flow together in the general cause. The intellect which has the innate knowledge that everything has its cause will accept the teaching that all causes in the world are founded in the absolute world cause anad must return to it. It is the quintessence of logic not only to ascertain the true nature of the intellect, but also to elucidate the nature of the universe by the help of the intellect. All things have a mother, but to expect that the world mother should logically have a mother is to carry logic to extremities and to misunderstand the intellect and its art of reasoning. If you have recognized the faculty of understanding as a part of existence, you will not wonder at its miracu- LETTERS ON LOGIC 269 lousness. Existence is wonderful. Its parts arise one out of the other, out of the universal interrelations of the one world. They all have their predecessors and causes. But what is true of the relative parts, is not true of the abso- lute whole. I am the son of my father and the father of my son, I am at the same time father and son. In the same way all things are simultaneously cause and effect. Although father and son are two different persons, still the capacity of being father and son rest in the same person, and al- though cause and effect are to be distinguished as two things, still they are two relations of the same thing. Persons and things, causes and effects, are not indepen- dent entities, but relative entities, are interconnections or relations of the absolute. The intellect is innate in us, and with it and through it also the consciousness of being, although it is innate in us only as the teeth of the child which grow after birth. Everything that we become aware of is known only as a part of the universe. In so far as this is wonderful, the consciousness of causality is miraculous. But, in fact, the knowledge of the causality of all things is innate wis- dom the same as that of the color of all white and black horses. At the same time it must be observed that every innate knowledge is in part acquired, and every acquired knowledge in part innate, so that both kinds intermingle and form one category. My whole argument aims to convince you that all things are worldly things, and their causality is only an- other name for the same thing, just as the German brot is called pain in French and bread in English. Thus we derive the firm conviction that if there is pain in heaven there will be bread, and if there are things, there will be 27 LETTERS ON LOGIC causes and effects, or interrelation with the unit of ex- istence. The mystery of causality is sometimes expressed by the statement that we possess the indubitable knowledge which extends beyond all experience that wherever a change takes place there must have preceded another change. Indeed, we have the faculty of recognizing the unity in the infinite multiplicity, and infinite multiplicity in the unity. Multiplicity, change, motion — who is to split hairs about them, who will make fine distinctions? The intellect is the photographic organ of the infinite mo- tion and transformations called the "world." It is and possesses the consciousness of cosmic changes. Is it a wonder that it knows that there is interrelation in its things, that no part of the world, not a particle of its mo- tion and transformations, stands alone by itself, that everything is connected and mutually dependent in and with the universe? Because this understanding is in a way innate in the intellect, therefore it understands that there is nothing but change, infinitely proceeding trans- formations. And if it detaches any single thing from this process, it knows that changes preceded it and changes will follow. In short, we must not marvel at any single part of nature, not even at the intellect, but admire the whole universe. Then fetishism will at last end and a true cult, the cult of world truth, can begin. The art of thinking, my dear Eugene, is not so easy. For this reason I keep on warning you against misunder- standing. I do not mean to advise you with the forego- ing against admiring any single part of nature, or of art, a landscape or a statue. My teaching merely tends to moderate admiration by the reflection that the whole LETTERS ON LOGIC 271 world is wonderful, that everything is beautiful, so that nothing ugly remains. The distinction between beautiful and ugly is only relative. Even when I say that the true worship of God, the cult of truth, cannot begin until idol worship ceases, you will appreciate the phrase and will not insinuate that I do not value the cultivation of science in the past, or that I hate idol worship to the extent of forgetting what I have emphasized repeatedly, viz., that idol worship is also worship of God, and error a paving stone on the way toward truth. The most minute thing is a magnitude. Everything is true, good, and beautiful, for the universe is absolute truth, beauty and goodness. I conclude with the words of Fr. von Sallet : A sunny view of world and life Is balm for brain and heart, It is with health and beauty rife, With noblest works of art. But do not for a moment think That it is captured in a wink. The golden harvest does not grow, Unless the early tempests blow. And only bitter woe and strain Will bright and lofty wisdom gain. SEVENTEENTH LETTER. My subject, dear Eugene, is the simplest in the world, but it requires thorough treatment for all its full under- standing. So every letter is in a way but a repetition of the same argument. "It is remarkable," says Schopen- 272 LETTERS ON LOGIC hauer, "that we find the few main theses of pre-socratic philosophy repeated innumerable times. Also in the works of modern thinkers, such as Cartesius, Spinoza, Leibniz, and even Kant, we find that their few main theses are repeated over and over." Now I ask you to consider what I said in my first let- ters, viz., that the titles of the principal philosophical works reveal that philosophy is engaged in the study of logic, in the analysis of the intellect and the art of its use. You will then recognize that in the very nature of the subject my presentation of the matter lacks systematiza- tion. It has no real beginning and end, because its object, the intellect, is interconnected with the whole universe, which is without beginning and end, which has neither before nor after, neither above nor below. You may venture that the relation of the intellect to the universe does not concern the intellect especially, but is a universal matter. That would be true. But it is easy to show that the art of thinking and wis- dom of the world are identical. And although the uni- versal interrelation of things is germain to all things and subjects, yet its consideration is a special task of logic which treats all objects of thought summarily. My subject therefore begins everywhere, even though it is a specialty. Hence I take the liberty to take my departure from any literature which I happen to study. In the present letter, I deal with "logical investigations" of the prominent Professor Trendelen- burg. His is a bulky volume, but you need not fear that I shall weary you with its subtleties. As a rule I read only the preface of philosophical works of the second and third order, their introduction and per- haps the first few chapters. Then I am approximately LETTERS ON LOGIC 273 informed as to what I may expect from them further on. One frequently finds statements which, if they do not throw new light on the subject, still bring out in bolder relief some of the accomplishments of his- torical research in our field. And in order that the son may not trust to the father alone, which might lead to distrust, I connect my argument with some state- ments of Trendelenburg. In the preface to the second edition the author complains of the "dull headache" which the Hegelian intoxication has left in Germany and says : "'Phi- losophy will not resume its old power until it be- comes consistent, and it will not become consistent until it grows in the same way that all other sciences do. In other words, it must not take a new departure in every brain and then quit, but it must approach its problems historically and develop them. The German prejudice must be abandoned, according to which the philosophy of the future is supposed to look for a new principle. This principle has already been found. It consists in the organic world conception, the funda- ments of which are resting in Plato and Aristotle." The Professor is right, but he overlooks that the philosophers, even of modern times, do not begin "each on his own account," do not have "each his own principle," or if they have, such a "false originality" is but the indifferent attribute of historical develop- ment which has handed the object of logic, the true art of thought, from generation to generation in an ever brighter condition. I repeat this emphatically for pedagogic reasons, because I consider it essential to convince you and the reader that the apparent paradoxes which I state are 274 LETTERS ON LOGIC the objects of discussion since time immemorial. I also wish to stimulate you to a study of the master works of philosophy which show the cheering spec- tacle, in the persons of the most brilliant specimens of the human mind, of the onward march of this mind from darkness to light. In order that the wheat contained in this human treas- ure box may not be concealed by the tares, I am endeavor- ing to throw light on the outcome of the historical devel- opment of philosophy, and for this purpose I continue to discuss the question by taking my departure in this in- stance from some further statements of Trendelenburg. "It is a peculiarity of philosophical methods of rea- soning to recognize a part in the whole, and it is tacitly assumed that the whole is descended from a thought which determines the parts. On the other hand, it is pecu- liar to empirical methods of analysis to study the parts without regard to their interrelation, or at best to collect them and put them together, and it is tacitly assumed that every point is something peculiar in itself which must be studied apart from all the rest." "The aim of all human understanding is always to solve the miracle of divine creation by further creative thought. When this task is undertaken in detail, the de- tail study forces one on to other things ; for things must go backwards toward their dissolution by the same force through which they arose out of the depths." These sentences state the problem before us. Shall we use the intellect philosophically, or shall we use it empirically? We are striving to understand the parts and the whole, and this is identical with the research after a systematical world philosophy, or with the art of dia- lectics. LETTERS ON LOGIC 275 Now we must state in the first place that thinking of any kind, whether it be philosophical or empirical, is of the same species, that the same kernel is contained in both forms. Roses are different flowers from carnations, but the flower nature is in both of them. Thus the nature of thought is contained in both philosophical and empirical thinking. The distinction is well enough, but their unity must not be lost sight of. The philosophers, he says, seek to understand the de- tail by the whole; the empirical thinkers analyze the details without regard to interrelations. But both methods of research are different specimens of the same genus, and both of them are one-sided when their interconnection is overlooked. The empirical thinker who seeks to under- stand the details in their isolation, thinks philosophically, when he regards his special research as a contribution to the whole, and the philosopher, who seeks to understand the detail by the whole, thinks empirically when he rightly regards all details as attributes of the whole. Trendelenburg, then, has expressed his case very obscurely. Both methods of stud)', if employed one- sidedly, entirely misconceive the art of thinking. The philosophers err when they regard the intellect as the only source of understanding and truth ; it is only a part of truth and must be supplemented by all the rest of the world. On the other hand, the empirical thinkers err when they look for understanding and truth exclusively in the outer world, without taking into account the intel- lectual instrument by the help of which they lift their treasures. In fact, such one-sided philosophers exist only in theory ; I mean there are some who imagine that truth could be one-sided. But in practice they all testify, much against their will, to the inevitable interconnection of mat- 276 LETTERS ON LOGIC ter and mind, of inside and outside. In the practical use of the intellect everybody shows that the part operates in the whole, and that the whole is active in its parts. We know a priori that the universe is a whole. The universal existence can be conceived only as of one kind or nature. The mere thought that there might be some- thing which does not partake of the nature of the universe is no thought, because it is a thought without sense or reason. The whole world is the supreme being, though I grant that we have but a vague conception of it. We have as yet no detailed, true, conception of the universe, but it is gradually acquired in the course of science. Still, our conception will never be perfect because details are infinitesimal and the absolute being is infinite growth. As to details, we know them more or less accurately and yet not accurately, because even the most minute part of the infinite is infinite. All science has searched in vain for atoms. What our understanding knows, has always been nothing but predicates or attributes of truth, although they are true attributes and are truly understood by us. I emphasize the inadequacy of all modes of thought and of all understanding in opposition to those who make an idol of science. I emphasize the truth of all perceptions in opposition to those knownothings who claim that truth cannot be understood, but can only be admired and. worshipped. Hence it follows for our theory of under- standing that intellect and reason and the art of thought are no independent treasure boxes which make any reve- lations to us. They are theoretical classifications which in practice are operative only in the universal interconnection of things. Understanding, perceiving, judging, distin- guishing and concluding, etc., are unable to produce any LETTERS ON LOGIC 271 truths. They can only enlighten and clarify experience by logical classification and distinction. Because man produces works which are preceded by planning, there- fore the philosophical mode of research has "assumed that the whole is descended from a thought." But this is an assumption of human origin, which is shown to be without foundation on closer analysis. The plans of our works are copies of natural originals and are "free crea- tions of the mind" only in a limited sense. The artists are well aware of the natural descent of their thoughts and fictions. To regard the world as the outcome of thought is a perverse logic. It is the first condition of rational, proletarian, thought to recognize the intellect and its products as attributes of the world subject. EIGHTEENTH LETTER Just as in political history action and reaction follow one another, just as periods of economic prosperity are alternated by periods of depression, so we find in litera- ture a periodical flucuation between philosophical and anti-philosophical tendencies. After Hegel had for a time thoroughly aroused the spirits, a time of apathy followed, so that this hero of thought who shortly before had been almost idolized could be attacked and reviled. For about a decade, a philo- sophical breeze has now once more been blowing. The subject of logic, the theory of understanding, is again the object of universal attention. This movement is stimu- lated by important discoveries in science, such as the heat equivalent of Robert Mayer, the origin of species by Dar- 278 LETTERS ON LOGIC win, etc., and natural science and philosophy may be com- pared to two miners who are digging a tunnel, so that sharp ears on both sides can hear the blows of the ham- mers and the clanging of the tools. There is much truth in this picture, but it may also lead to misunderstandings. By the vivisection of frogs and rabbits, by boring into the brain, physiology will not discover the mind. No microscope, no telescope, will reveal the nature of reason and truth or the art of logical discernment; Neither will Lazarre Geiger, Max Miiller, Steinthal, and Noire succeed in philology in solving the "last ques- tions of all knowledge" by the help of any primitive arch- language. At the same time, the value of the co-operation of these gentlemen is not denied, only I desire to point out that the comparison with the tunnel is not quite accurate. What Marx said of economic formulas, is true of logical formulas: "In their analysis neither the microscope nor chemical reagents are of any service. The power of abstraction must replace them both." The two sciences will finally meet, not because each one of them digs away in its own one-sided fashion, but because the miners meet after working hours and ex- change their experiences. And the philosophers may be the dominant party, because they are specialists in logic and therefore prepared to utilize anything which may serve their purpose, no matter from what side it comes. The other party, on the other hand, has its own specialties and promotes the cause of logic in a secondary and invol- untary fashion. Natural science has its own .monism which is dis- tinguished from philosophical proletarian monism in that LETTERS ON LOGIC 279 it does not appreciate the historical outcome of philosoph- ical research. One of the most prominent representatives of the former is Noire. He entitles one of his little works "Monistic Thought," but shows himself on its pages as a very unclear dualist. He speaks of the "dual nature of causality" and relates that the mind operates with a differ- ent causality than the mere mechanical one. He calls this other "sensory causality." According to him the world has only two attributes : "Motion and sensation are the only true and objective qualities of the world. . . . Motion is the truly objective . . . though it is admitted that it gives us only the phenomenon. . . . Sensation makes up the internal nature of things. Every subject, whether man or atom, is endowed with the two qualities of all beings, viz., motion and sensation." Thereupon I have carefully looked for an explanation in Noire's works, why he regards the nature of things as composed of an external and an internal quality, and why sensation should not be regarded as a sort of motion, but the only reason I could find was the dualistic nature of his "monistic" reasoning. As Schopenhauer provided the whole world with a "will," so Noire provides it with "sensation." Kant and his "Critical Philosophy" held in their time that our intellect perceives only the phenomena of nature, while the mystic law of causality, according to him, points to a hidden being, which cannot be perceived but must be believed, which we may venerate but must leave undis- turbed by science. Schopenhauer, his brilliant successor, who in spite of his brilliancy did not materially advance the cause of philosophy, mystified the problem of causality by his discovery that the nature of the world is will power. 280 LETTERS ON LOGIC These teachings of Kant and Schopenhauer are dressed up anew and mixed with the recent discoveries of science by Noire. But he entirely ignores the work of Schelling and Hegel, who by their criticisms have made evident the lack of logic in the Kantian separation of phenomenon (apparition) from noumenon (essence), of cause from effect. You are familiar with the silly question wnether Goethe or Schiller, Shakespere or Byron, is the greater poet, and you will not think that I am trying to elevate Hegel above Kant or Kant above Hegel. They are just two cogs on the spinning wheel of history. If the second crushes what the first has cracked, such is the result of their succession. Natural science is also a valuable co-operator in the solution of the world problem, not so much by digging in the logical tunnel itself, or making amateur excursions into the fields of philosophy or metaphysics, but because it elucidates and renders tangible the special object of logic in such far-embracing objects as the unity of natural forces or of animal species. The scientific presentation of this special object, however, requires a brain armed with the full equipment of the historical outcome of philosophy. Now you must not believe that I am conceited enough to place my own little personality on the pedestal as the only^true philosopher. I am too well aware of my short- comings as a self-educated man. But seeing that I have striven earnestly and without prejudice since my young days to understand the high object of my studies, I feel in my heart a certain confidence in my qualification to deal with it. On the other hand, I know my lack of that sort of learning which is required in order to be able to present the scientifically much-courted nature of the human mind LETTERS ON LOGIC 281 in such a form and with such emphasis as its sublime character deserves. And if I, nevertheless, come before the public on various occasions with my tentative works, I offer as an excuse that hitherto the Messiah has not ap- peared who will come after me and whose John the Bap- tist I should like to be. You, my dear Eugene, will take me soberly and reduce my resounding words to their proper measure, when I, in the intoxication of enthusiasm, flow over like that now and then. You know that I am no hero worshipper. Though all research is but the product of individual minds, the mind of each man is a part of the universal mind which produces science. Now follows the point which forms the conclusion of all my letters : The intel- lect which produces science is indeed a part of man, but still more a part of the world, it is the universal world intellect, the reason of the absolute, the absolute reason. The study of this intellect at work, not merely in shoe- making, in anatomy, or in astronomy, but in all fields, in the infinite, of its life in the absolute, is the means by which the art of logic is acquired. It is true that the in- finite exists only in finite parts, and you cannot conceive of the infinite directly, you can perceive it only in its parts. And in perceiving them you must always remember that every part is an infinite piece of the infinite universe. In his "Introduction and Proofs of a Monistic Theory of Understanding," Noire, after enumerating the new points contained in his work, adds sneeringly that he is "not in a position to give any new clews as to the nature of the absolute." For this very reason I want to denounce his "Monism" as a shallow piece of work, which offers only the name instead of the essence. The well-known Ernst Hseckel knows a great deal 282 LETTERS ON LOGIC more about this subject. In a lecture given at the twenty- fifth convention of natural scientists in Eisenach, he calls the monistic view of nature "a grand pantheistic one." The essence of all religion, according to him, consists in the "conviction of a final and unmistakably common cause of all things." And he continues : "In the admission that with the present day organization of our brain, we are unable to penetrate to the final cause of all things, the critical natural philosophy and dogmatic religion agree." Whether the professor is one of those natural philos- ophers who regard the human mind as too narrow for the understanding of the "unmistakably (hence somewhat understood) common cause of all things," is not quite clear to me, nor probably to the famous scientist himself. For he adds : "The more we progress in the understand- ing of nature, the more we approach that unattainable final cause." And further on : "The purest form of mon- istic faith culminates in the conviction of the unity of God and nature." Now I ask : If nature, God, and absolute truth are one and the same thing, have we not learned something about the "final cause of all things?" What necessity is there in that case for speaking in such an abjectedly hum- ble tone of human understanding, or to assign nothing but straw and husks to it, in the language of Hegel ? You see, then, that Hseckel has a higher estimate of absolute nature than Noire who does not care to have any- thing to do with the nature of the absolute. But my object at this moment is to convince you that neither the one nor the other of these two, nor natural science, so- called, is directly digging in the tunnel which will give us light on the question of the limits of our understanding and the final cause of things. Our logic, on the other LETTERS ON LOGIC 283 hand, which treats the intellect as a part of nature, culti- vates a natural science that includes the mere empirical natural science in the same way in which the day of twenty-four hours includes the day of twelve hours and the night. Natural science proper deals mainly with tangible things. Light and sound, the objects of eye and ear, are still included in its studies. The objects of smell and taste stand on the dividing line. But the socalled sciences of the mind, such as grammar and politics, political economy and history, morals and law, and most decidedly logic, are entirely excluded. Such a limitation is well enough, if we remember that it is purely formal. However, it must not overlook the bridge which leads from limited nature to universal, in- finite, nature. The monism of natural science has a far too narrow view of the universe. When it says that "all is motion," it says just as little or as much as Solomon with his "all is vain." Everything is crooked and straight, everything great and small, everything temporal and eternal, every- thing truth and life. But nothing is thus said to show the meaning of distinction in this world, to explain how rest exists in motion, and sense in nonsense. In order to differentiate logically we must know that everything is everything, that the universe or absolute is its own cause and the final cause of all things, which em- braces all distinctions, even that of causality and that be- tween matter and mind. NINETEENTH LETTER "Philosophy should not try to be edifying," said 284 LETTERS ON LOGIC Hegel. This means that religious feeling is far below scientific thought. But there is a reverse side to this sen- tence, viz., that thoughts which do not rise to the edifying interconnection of all things, no matter whether they re- main stuck in some specialty on account of frivolousness or of narrowmindedness, are far below a wise world phil- osophy. In a former letter I have already emphasized, and I hope to prove it more convincingly, that the conception of "God," or of the absolute, is indispensable for a logical world philosophy. You know that in my dictionary the gods and divinities of all religions and denominations are "idols," and justly so, since they are all manufactured images. Instead of the entire universe, they worship a more or less unessen- tial part of it. The religions show by their idolatry, the sciences fre- quently by their little creditable indifference, that they have no conception of the intellect and its art of reason- ing. The universe is a familiar conception. Everybody uses it, and there is apparently little to say about it. But in fact it is the conception of all conceptions, the being of all beings, the cause of itself which has no other cause and no other being beside itself. That the whole world is contained in the universe is so obvious that you may wonder at my waste of words over such a matter-of-fact thing. But when you consider that the people have always searched for a world cause outside of the world, together with a beginning of the world and a transcen- dental truth, then you will see that they have not grasped the conception of the world as a whole, as a universe. And if that is admitted, then the proof that it is the cause LETTERS ON LOGIC 28o of all causes, the beginning of all beginnings, and the truth of all truths, is not such a superfluous undertaking. Now you may say that it is presumptuous to try to understand the whole universe at once. This objection is justified in a way, according to the interpretation of the words. Still I hope that it will be my justification to de- clare that it is not a question of understanding the uni- verse in detail, but only in general, not each and every- thing in its differentiation, but only in a summary way. And it is only the edifying conception of the universe as a whole which will open for you the door to the under- standing of the human mind, of thought, and the art of using it. We wish to understand the conception ; not this or that conception, but the whole conception, the concep- tion of the whole. You will no longer indulge in the superstition that the faculty of thought or understanding is a thing apart from the world's interconnection. I pre- sume that you have now learned enough about the art of thought to be sure not to think of anything without its worldwide interrelation. For so long as one imagines that a piece of wood or a stone is a thing in itself, without connection with light and air, with Earth, Moon, and Sun, he has a very barbarian conception of the things of this world. I maintain that the understanding of the human faculty of reason and the art of its use are inseparable from the world concept. And I want this understood in the sense, that it is not a mistake to distinguish between the internal mind and the outside world, but that these are merely formal distinctions of the essentially indivisible and absolute universe. The concept of this true God or divine, because uni- versal, Truth shows on close analysis that it includes the 286 LETTERS ON LOGIC special truth of the art of thought as well as all other sciences, and pre-eminently the science of thought, be- cause this science must not limit itself to any special thing, but must be world wisdom by its very will and nature. To understand the universe, then, means to become aware that this being of all beings has no beginning, no cause, no truth nor reason outside and beside itself, but has everything in and by itself. To understand the uni- verse means to recognize that one is rushing beyond the worldly infinity into the realm of fantastic transcenden- talism and abusing the intellect, when illogically applying such terms as beginning and end, cause and effect, being and not being, to the absolute universe. Such an illogical use of the faculty of thought is well illustrated and re- buked by the poet who ueestions and answers: "And when my life has passed away, What will become of me? The world has one eternal day, 'Thereafter' cannot be." In order to acquire the universal sense, you will strive to understand that the universe includes all relative things, while as a whole it embodies the absolute or the edifying deity. If you would become world-wise, you must learn that the things called opposites and contradictions have a dif- ferent meaning than is ordinarily applied to them by the logic of the idolators. They say that God and the world, body and soul, truth and error, life and death, etc., are irreconcilable antipodes ; that they exclude one another ; that they cannot be brought under the same roof, but LETTERS ON LOGIC 287 must be kept wide apart by the laws of eternal reason. But this doctrine of contradiction is merely narrow dog- matism, which confuses the minds instead of enlightening them. Certainly, death differs from life, the perishable from the imperishable, black from white, crooked from straight, large from small. Who would be silly enough to deny that ? But even the apparently most contradictory and opposite things may be classified under the same genus, family, or species, as twins in a mother's womb. The same thing that does not prevent male and female from sitting in the same nest, does not prevent the most widely different things, in spite of their separate charac- ters, from being one and the same, from being two pieces of the same caliber. You are certainly still the same Eugene that you were as a little baby, and yet you are at the same time another. The experts in physiology even claim that they can compute how often a man of sixty has changed his flesh, bones, skin, and hair. Although the old man is the same individual that he was when first born, yet he never remained the same. You will see by this illustration that all difference is of the same nature, a general, supreme, universal being, absolute and divine, and this absolute world being is highly edifying, because it comprises all other beings and is the Alpha and Omega of all things. Is this world-god a mere idea ? No, it is the truth and life itself. And it is very interesting to note that the so- called "ontological proof of the existence of God" agrees very well with the world truth which I proclaim in the tabernacle of logic. This proof is originally attributed to the learned Anselmo of Canterbury. However that may be, it is certain that Descartes and Spinoza support him with their famous names. They hold that the "most per- 288 LETTERS ON LOGIC feet being" must necessarily have existence, because other- wise it would not be the most perfect. "I understood very well," writes Descartes in the fourth section of his "Method of Correct Thought," "that in accepting the hypothesis of a triangle I would have to accept the fact that the sum of its three angles is equal to two right angles. But nothing convinced me of the presence of such a triangle, while I found that my con- ception of the most perfect being was as inseparably linked to existence as my conception of a triangle is to the identity of the sum of its angles with two right angles. Hence it is certainly as undeniable as any geo- metrical proof can be that God exists as this most perfect being." This argument appears to me as clear as daylight and ought to convince you, not of the existence of a transcen- dental idol, but of the truth of the absolute and most per- fect world being. If you were to remark that this per- fectness is not so very great, considering its many obvious imperfections, I should ask you not to split hairs and to recognize with sane senses that these imperfections of the world belong as logically to the perfect world as the evil desires belong to virtue which becomes virtue only by the test of overcoming them. The conception of a perfection which has no imperfections to overcome would be a silly idea. Now in conclusion let me say a few words of apology for continually interchanging the universe and the concept of the universe. I frequently speak of the idea of a thing as if it were the thing itself. But see here ! Do you not ask on seeing the portrait of some person unknown to you : Who is this ? And do you not interchange the por- trait for the person itself, without difficulty and misunder- LETTERS ON LOGIC 289 standing? The idea stands in the same relation to the thing, as the portrait to the person it represents. This re- mark is directed against that unsound logic which knows only the separation of the idea from the thing, of reason from its objects, but does not grasp the mere formality of such a distinction, does not appreciate the unity of the world, the edifying and supreme truth, the truth of the supreme being. This letter, my dear Eugene, pleads for edification, but only for that kind of edification which includes the unedi- fying, whereby edification is sobered down. If you would give the name of pantheism to this world philosophy, you should remember that it is not a sentimental and exalted, but a common sense pantheism, a deification which has the taste of the godless. TWENTIETH LETTER Dear Eugene: Today I am going to present my case with the pre- cision of a schoolmaster. The concept of white cabbage embraces all white cab- bage heads that ever were and ever will be. The concept of cabbage embraces red, white, and many other kinds of cabbage. The concept of vegetable embraces a still wider range. The organic field is still more comprehensive. And finally the world concept em- braces everything which we know and don't know, the end of which we cannot conceive, and which therefore is called infinite. When we trace our steps backward over the same rea- soning, we find at once that the universal concept is 290 LETTERS ON LOGIC divided into two parts, viz., the universe and the concep- tion of it. We thus find the world in the concept and the concept in the world, so that both of these parts are inter- connected, each is the predicate of the other, and whether we turn the thing to the right or to the left, the concept is in the world and the world in the concept. Now it is true that the concept, or the faculty of under- standing, is the object of our study rather than the world outside of it. The faculty of understanding, by the way, is nothing but a collective noun for all concepts, hence simply another name for concept in general. But what I eternally repeat is this : We cannot make a concept sepa- rated from all the rest of the world the object of our study, because that would be an empty abstraction which does not take on any meaning until we connect it with the world, for instance the special concept of cabbage with sense-perceived cabbage and so forth. The concepts of white cabbage, cabbage in general, vegetables, or plants, etc., are all of them special con- cepts and at the same time general concepts. The one and the other is relative. Compared to the various species it includes, the general concept of cabbage is abstract, while compared to the general concept of vegetables it is con- crete. And so it is with all concepts. They are abstract and concrete at the same time. Only the final concept, the world concept, is neither concrete nor abstract, but abso- lute. It is the concept of the absolute, which is indispen- sable for an understanding of logic. We found a while ago that the absolute world concept consisted of two parts, viz., the concept and the world. In the same way, the chemists teach us that water consists of two elements, each of which by itself does not make any water, while their compound makes pure water. But LETTERS ON LOGIC 291 we do not need such distant illustrations. My table in its present composition is something different from what it would be if the same pieces were put together in some other way and without a plan. Therefore the world concept is a far more sublime con- cept then all the parts of which it consists. And in order to make this quite clear, I may honor this compound of the world and its concept by a special name, say "uni- verse," so as to distinguish it from its component parts. Now I declare, without fear of having the word turned in my mouth by any sophist, that the world embracing the thought, or the universe, is the absolute which includes everything, while the world and the thought of it, each by itself, are but classifications or relative things. We wish to understand thought, not empty abstract thought, but the universal world-embracing thought, the thought in a philosophical sense. This is not mere thought, but living truth, the universe, the absolute, the supreme being. It is with the universe and its parts as it is with a tele- scope and its concentric rings. Our intellect is a special ring which gives us a picture of the whole concentric thing. This photographer, as I have called it in a former letter, is not the object of our study for its own sake, nor for the sake of its pictures, but rather for the sake of the original, of the universe. It is as if somebody were to buy a portrait of some historically renowned person. No matter how much concerned the buyer would be with the picture, in the last analysis he is concerned with that per- son itself. So it is with the art of understanding the ab- solute, with world wisdom, which we study not for the sake of the wisdom, but of the world itself. This lengthy discussion might have been cut short by 292 LETTERS ON LOGIC simply speaking of the world instead of going to so much trouble on account of the world concept. But I should then miss my point, which is that the human intellect is a part of the world, and that the ideological distinction which separates this intellect from the rest of the world, requires for the whole an embracing term. The absolute concept is the concept of the absolute, of the supreme being. To it applies all the true, good, and beautiful ever attributed to God, and it is also that being which lends logic, consistency, and form to all thought. Plato is a philosopher who has thrown a wonderful light on the faculty of understanding, though he has. not fully explained it. In his dialogue entitled "Gorgias," he makes Socrates say the following: ''Does it seem to you that men want that with which they occupy themselves at any time, or that for the sake of which they undertake whatever they may be engaged in? Do those, for in- stance, who take some medicine prescribed by the physi- cians seem to want that which they do . or to want that for the sake of which they take medicine, viz., health? ... In the same way those who go on board of ships and trade«do not want that which they are doing ; for who would care to go to sea and face danger or conquer obstacles? That for which they go to sea is that which they want, viz., to become rich ; they are going to sea for the sake of acquiring wealth." Plato thus says that the immediate purposes of men are not their real purposes, but means to an end, means to welfare or for "good." He therefore continues : "It is in pursuit of good, then, that we go when we go, be- cause we are after something better, and we stand still for the sake of the same ffood." LETTERS ON LOGIC 293 Now let us go a step farther than Socrates and Plato. Just as men's actions are truly done, not for the sake of some immediate purpose, but of the ulterior, of welfare, and just as their socalled ethical actions are justified only by the general wellbeing, so all things of the world are not substantiated by their immediate environment, but by the infinite universe. It is not the seed planted in the soil which is the cause of the growing plant, as the farmer thinks, but the Earth, the Sun, the winds, and the weather, in short, the whole of nature, and that includes the seed germ. If we apply this reasoning to our special object, the faculty of understanding, we find that it is not a narrowly human, nor a transcendental, but a universal cosmic faculty. According to Homer, the immortal gods call things by other names than mortal men. But once you have grasped the concept of the absolute, you understand the language of the gods, you understand that the intellect by itself is but a minute particle, while in the interrelation with the universe it is an absolute and integral part of the universal absolute. All things have a dual nature, all of them are limited parts of the unlimited, the inexhaustible, the unknowable. Just as all things are small and great, temporal and eter- nal, so all of them including the human mind are know^ able and unknowable at the same time. We must not idolize the faculty of thought nor forget its divine nature. Man should be humble, but without bowing in doglike submission to a transcendental spirit, and he should be sustained by the sublime consciousness that his spirit is the true one, the spirit of universal truth. Everything can be seen by eyes, including those of a hawk. Just as the eye is the instrument of vision, so the 294 LETTERS ON LOGIC intellect is the instrument of thought. And just as specta- cles and glasses are means of assisting the eye in seeing, so senses, experience, and experiments are means of assisting the intellect in understanding. With this equip- ment the intellect can assimilate everything in its concep- tions. It understands "all," but "all" only in a relative sense. We understand all, just as we buy everything for money. We can buy only what is for sale. Reason and sunshine cannot be valued in money. We can see every- thing with eyes, and yet not everything. Sounds and smells cannot be seen. Just as everything is great and small, so everything is knowable and unknowable, accord- ing to the meaning given to "everything" in the language of men or gods. That word has the dual meaning of applying to any particle and to the whole universe. So is the human mind universal, but only a universal specialty. Look at that magnificently colored carnation. You see the whole flower, and yet you do not see all of it. You do not see its scent nor its weight. In the human language "whole" means a relative whole, which is at the same time a part. Every particle of the universe is such a dual thing. But in the language of the gods, which is spoken by phil- osophy, only the absolute universe is whole. When the subject under discussion is not the intel- lect but some other part of the world, for instance the eyes, the universal concept of the absolute is not so impor- tant, because the faculty of seeing, like the faculty of wealth, is in little danger of being metaphysically abused. One knows that eyes which can see around a corner, or through a block of iron, or which can perceive the scent of a carnation, are as meaningless as a white sorrel. Even though our eyes cannot see the invisible, that does not LETTERS ON LORIC 295 prevent them from being a universal instrument which can see everything, that is everything visible. If you understand this, you will also see through the miserable wisdom of. the professors which wallows on its belly in the dust and cries with the faithful : O Lord, O Lord ! similarly to Du Bois-Reymond, who cries out : Ignorabimus! It is true that the human mind is an igno- ramus in the sense that it is ever learning, because there is inexhaustible material in nature. There is also some- thing unknowable in every particle of nature, just as there is something invisible in every carnation. But the un- knowable in the sense used by those ignorant people who cannot understand the human mind because they have a transcendental monster in their mind, such a monstrous unknowable exists only in the imagination of the idolators to whom the true spirit reveals itself as little as the spirit of truth. Just as surely as we know that there cannot be in heaven any knife without a blade and a handle, nor any black horses that are white, just so surely do we know that the faculty of understanding can never and nowhere be the absolute, but must always be a special faculty. The concept of understanding, like the concept of a knife, is limited to a definite instrument. There may be all kinds of knives and intellects, but nothing exists that has escaped from its own skin or from the limitation of its own particular concept. By this standard you may measure the silly thought of those who speak transcendentally of an unlimited faculty of understanding. They haven't any right idea of the mind nor of the universe, of the conceivable nor of the inconceivable, otherwise they would not speak in such a nonsensical sense of the "Limits of Understanding." In 296 LETTERS ON LOGIC short, you see that the relative limitation or absoluteness of reason can only be understood by means of the con- cept of the absolute. TWENTY-FIRST LETTER The proletarian logic of the working class searches after the supreme being. The working class knows that it must serve but it wants to know whom to serve. Shall it be an idol or a king ? Where, who, what, is the supreme being to which everything else is subordinate, which brings system, consistency, logic, into our thought and actions? The next question is then: By what road do we arrive at its understanding ? Any transcendental reve- lation being of no use to us, there are only two ways open : Reason and experience. Now it is a mistake of common logic to regard these two roads as separate, while, in fact, they are one and the same common road, which by the help of empirical reason or reasonable experience leads us to the point where we recognize that the supreme being to which everything is subordinate, is nothing special, not a part or a particle, but the universe itself with all its parts. We take medicine for the sake of health, we make efforts for the sake of wealth. But neither health nor wealth are an end in themselves. What good is health to us, when we have nothing to bite ? What good are all the treasures of Croesus, if health is lacking? Therefore health and wealth must be combined. Nor is that enough. There is a spirit in us that drives us farther ahead. There are still other treasures and requirements, for instance contentment is surely one of them. But the motive power LETTERS ON LOGIC 297 of the world spirit is so infinite, that it is not satisfied until it has everything. Everything, then, in other words the whole world, that is the true end. Socrates and his school, to whom I alluded in the pre- ceding letter, wandered the way of separate reason for the purpose of finding the supreme being, the true, the good, the beautiful. The platonic dialogues paint a very mag- nificent picture of the truth that neither health nor wealth, neither bravery nor devotion, are "the greatest good," but that it is mainly a question of the understanding and use to which mankind put these things. Accordingly they are good or bad, they are but relative "goods.' Love and faith, honesty and veracity, are good enough, but not the good ; they only partake of the good. What is sought is that which is under all circumstances absolutely good, true, and beautiful. When Socrates asked his disciples to define the good or reasonable, they enumerated as a rule a series of good and reasonable specialties, while the master was contin- ually compelled to instruct them, that his research was not aimed at those objects. They name important virtues, and he wants to know what absolute virtue is. They name good things, and he is looking for the good, for pure goodness, while the good things have the bad quality of being good only under certain circumstances. The Socratic school then finds out that only the under- standing or the intellect can find the circumstances under which we may arrive at the absolute. Understanding, the human mind, philosophy, is to them the divine. Thus they arrive at their famous "Know thyself," which in their language means : Hold introspection and rack your brain. But they did not succeed in thus using the intellect as an oracle. Nor did the Christian philosophers of later times 298 LETTERS ON LOGIC fare any better with that method, when they changed the title of the object of their studies and substituted God, Liberty, and Immortality, for the good, the true, and the beautiful. In order to get out of the confusion resulting from the many names given to the object of logic in the course of history, it must be remembered that pagan as well as Christian research founded their quest for the absolute on the innate need of understanding the supreme being which was to be the pivot of all thought and action. Polytheism had to have a supreme god, no matter whether his name was Zeus or Jupiter. In consequence of this longing for unity it was very natural that the place of the many immortals was finally taken by one eternal father of all. The philosophers are distinguished from the the- ologians only in so far as the former seek for the fulcrum of the world more on real than on imaginary ground. After more than two thousand years of mediation by intermediary links, ancient philosophy has at last been transformed into modern democratic-proletarian logic which recognizes that the intellect is an instrument which leads to the supreme being on condition that it does not rack the brain but goes outside of itself and consciously connects itself with the world outside. This connection constitutes the supreme being, the imperishable, eternal, truth, goodness, beauty, and reason. All other things only "partake of it," to use Platonic language. Although the Socratic school were handicapped by many fantastical attributes, still they were on the road towards true logic, as neither health nor wealth, nor any other treasure or virtue satisfied them. They did not care for true phenomena, but for truth itself. But truth is the universe, and man must understand that this is the only LETTERS ON LOGIC 299 truth, in order to be able to use his intellect logically, to be reasonable in the highest and classical sense of this word. All the world speaks of logic and logical thought. But when you, my son, as a thinking man feel the need of get- ting out of phraseology and knowing exactly what words should mean, you will hardly find one book that will give you sufficient light on the subject of logic. The best book would be the Bible, perhaps. I mean that, when you in- quire after beginning and end, purpose and destination, in short, after that which would give you and all things a definite support, when you search for the vortex around which everything revolves, then the Bible does not tell you about the beginning of this or that part of history, but speaks of the absolute beginning and end of all his- tory, of the general purpose and general destination of all existence. That is what I call logic. The free thinkers were not satisfied with religious mythology, they wanted to bring consistency and logic into their brains by their own studies. Plato and Aristotle have done good work along this line. So have the subse- quent philosophers, Cartesius, Spinoza, Kant. The main impediment for all of them was the obstinate prejudice that man could have reason in his own brain. Of course, that is where he has it, but it is not reasonable reason. The intellect shut up in the skull has not wisdom in its keeping, as the ancients thought. Wisdom cannot be acquired by racking your brain. Hegel is right : Reason is in the brain, it is in all things, "everything is reason- able." I merely repeat, then, that the universe is the true reason. You will not misunderstand the term "racking your brain." I am not an opponent of introspective thought, 300 LETTERS ON LOGIC but only desire to call your attention to the fact that it has led to the wrong habit of separating thought from sight, hearing, feeling, of divesting the mind of the body. Just as the Christian looked for salvation outside of the flesh, so the philosophers looked for reason or understand- ing outside of the connection with the rest of the world, outside of experience. It was especially the research after the nature of the intellect which imagined it had to creep inside of itself. When studying the stars, we look at the heavens ; when endeavoring to enrich our knowledge of plants, we gather flowers. But if we attempt to understand the mind, we must not rack our brain, nor dissect it with an anatomical knife. We shall indeed find the brain, but not the mind, not reason. And even the brain is not so easily cut out, as many an overzealous materialist may think. The student of anat- omy who pries into the nature of the brain substance knows very well that this substance is not contained in the head of this or that fellow, but must be sought in many heads before the average brain is found, which differs materially from that of Peter or Paul. This will show that your brain is not only your own, but also "partakes" of the universal brain, and you will easily conclude from this how much less your reason is yours alone. Hegel is right : Not only men, but everything is reasonable. True, the most rotten conditions may be defended by such maxims. Hence the great logician Hegel has the bad name of having been, not a philosopher of the people, but a royal state philosopher of Prussia. I will neither blacken nor whitewash him, nor will I overlook that he left the great cause in a state of mystical obscurity. But I recognize that even the worst prejudices, the most per- LETTERS ON LOGIC 301 verted morals, laws and institutions, have their reasonable justification in the times and conditions of their origin. Such an understanding is immediately followed by the further insight, that the most reasonable things, crushed by the wheel of time, will become rotten and unreasonable. In short, the "good" is not any special institutions, but is found in the interrelations of the universe. Only the absolute is absolutely good. And for this reason not only some conservative editors of capitalist papers, but also the revolutionary authors of the "Communist Manifesto," are genuine Hegelians. TWENTY-SECOND LETTER Dear Eugene: Socrates teaches: When we walk, it is not walking, when we stand still, it is not standing which is our pur- pose. We always have something ulterior in view, until finally the general welfare is the true end of our actions, in other words, the "good." And on closer analysis you will find that your individual welfare, the socalled egoistic good, is not enough in itself. You are not only related to your father, mother, broth- ers, sisters, relatives and friends, but also to your com- munity, state, and finally to the entire population of the globe. Your welfare is dependent on their welfare, on the welfare of the whole. I know very well that the horizon of the everyday capi- talist minds does not reach farther than they can see from the steeple of their church. They think according to the bad maxim : The shirt is closer to the skin than the coat. If I had to choose between the shirt and the coat, I should 302 LETTERS ON LOGIC prefer to wear the coat without a shirt rather than to run around in shirt sleeves as the object of universal ridicule. The old man ■ who plants a tree the fruits of which he will perhaps never see is not such a capitalist mind, otherwise he would sow seeds that would ripen during this year's summer. At this juncture we must remember that the disciples of Socrates who looked for the absolute under the name of the "good," were in so far narrow as they conceived of it only from the moral, specifically human, standpoint, in- stead of at the same time considering its cosmic side. Just as health and wealth belong together, and even these are not sufficient for human welfare which further requires all social and political virtues, so the good is not com- prised in the interrelations of all mankind, but passes beyond them and connects itself with the entire universe. Without the universe man is nothing. He has no eyes without light, no ears without sound, no morals without physics. Alan is not so much the measure of all things ; his more or less intimate connection with all things is rather the measure of all humanity. Not narrow moral- ity, but the universe, the supreme being, is the good in the very highest meaning of the word, is absolute good, right, truth, beauty, and reason. In my preceding letter I spoke of universal reason and said that not alone men, but also mountains, valleys, for- ests and fields, and even fools and knaves were reasonable. Now you are familiar with that student's song: "What's Coming from the Heights ?" and you know that it makes everything leathern. It speaks of a leathern hill, a leathern coach-driver, a leathern letter, even father, mother, and sister are of leather. And I mention this simply for the purpose of showing that I understand that we cannot call LETTERS ON LOGIC 303 leather reasonable and reasonable leathern without brew- ing a mixture of language which is lacking the mark by which all reasonable language is distinguished from chat- tering, howling, and roaring. Language is only reason- able when it classifies the world and distinguishes things by different names. This is easily understood. But it is more difficult to see that those who use their intellect without logical train- ing exaggerate distinctions to such an extent that they ignore the connection between them. All things are not only distinct, but also connected. But logic so far must be blamed for not rising to the recognition of the interrela- tion of all things. The science of understanding fre- quently treats reason and experience as if they were two different things without a common nature. Therefore, I make it a point to insist that there is no experience without reason and no reason without experience. The linguists who dispute about the question whether reason has developed after language or language after reason agree that both belong together. One cannot speak without the use of reason, or talk without sense, be- cause chattering, or babbling, or whatever one may wish to call it, are everything else but language. On the other hand, there can be no reason without naming the things of this world, so as to distinguish between leather and lady, between reason and experience. Of course, the idea of a leathern lady is only a youthful prank. Still it is calculated to illustrate the dialectic transfusion of all names and things, of all subjects and predicates. It shows indirectly that according to common sense thought, reason has its home only in the brain of man, and that this reason is nevertheless unsound when it does not know and remember that the individual human 304 LETTERS ON LOGIC brain is connected with all brains, and reasons with the whole world, so that only all existence and the entire uni- verse is reasonable in the highest meaning of the word. In order to be able to use your reason in all research and on all objects in a reasonable manner, you must know that the whole world has one nature, even leather and your sister. Apparently there is a wide gulf between these two, and yet in both of them the same forces are active, just as a black horse has the same horse nature as a white horse, so that from this point of view your sister is indeed leath- ern and leather sisterly. Such statements sound paradoxi- cal enough, yet I insist on making them in this extreme manner in order to fully reveal the absolute oneness of all existence, since it is the indispensable basis of a reason- able understanding of logic. Take one of the questions of the day now agitating the public mind, for a further illustration. Two tendencies are now observed in the most radical political movement of the nations. One of them is called propaganda of the deed. It works in Russia and Ireland with dynamite, powder, and lead. The other recommends the propa- ganda of the word, of the vote, and of lawful agitation. And the difference between these two is not discussed rea- sonably with a view to ascertaining for whom, when, where, and why, this or that propaganda is fitting, but. every one tries to present his relative truth with the fanac- ical sectarianism of those who claim absolute truth. But if you have grasped the method of getting at truth, the true method of using your reasoning faculty, you will take sides for one thing today and for another thing to- morrow, because you will understand that all roads are leading toward Rome. And if some of the comrades out- vote you occasionally, you will still value these antagon- LETTERS ON LOGIC 305 ists as friends, and if yoit combat them, even in a war to the knife, this will still be a relative war, a use of the knife with reason. Our proletarian logic is tolerant, not fanatical. This logic does not want to be reasonable without passion, nor passionate without reason. It does not abolish the differ- ence between friend and foe, between truth and falsehood, between reason and nonsense, but calms the fanaticism which exaggerates those distinctions. ')Its fundamental maxim is : There is only one absolute, the universe. Remember well that the conception of a universe which has anything outside or beside itself is still more senseless, if possible, than the idea of wooden iron. You thus see that all differences have one common nature which does not permit a transcendentally wide difference between things or opinions. Because the universe is the ^ipreme being, therefore all differences, even those of Opinion, are unessential. For the purpose of studying logic, I entreat you to pay special attention to the question of essential differ- ences and to test it by your own experience which will come to you from day to day. By means of our logic we learn the language of the gods. In the dictionary of this language, there is only one essential being, the universal or supreme being. On the other hand, the language of the mortals calls every particle a "being," but such being can be relative beings only. Every ear of a cornfield, every hair of an ox skin, and even every one of their particles, is such a being. But these relative beings are at the same time unessential at- tributes. Thus all differences between the particles of the world are simultaneously essential and unessential; in 306 LETTERS ON LOGIC other words, they have a relative existence, they merely partake of the supreme being, compared to whom they are absolutely unessential. Whether you are a good or a bad man, whether your country is happy or unhappy, free or oppressed, is very essential to you or me, but compared with the great absolute whole it is very unessential. In the universal history the fate of any single nation has no more significance than one hair on my head, although none of my hairs is there by mere chance and all of them have been counted. Hence everything is in its particular and isolated self an unessential thing, but in the general interrelation everything is a necessary, reasonable, essen- tial and divine particle. And now we come to the moral of it all. The human reason, the special object of logical research, partakes of the nature of the universe. It is nothing in itself. As an isolated being, it is wholly void and incapable of produc- ing any understanding or knowledge. Only in connec- tion, not merely with the material brain, but with the entire universe, is the intellect capable of existing and act- ing. It is not the mere brain which thinks, but the whole man is required for that purpose ; and not man alone, but the total interrelation with the universe is necessary for the purpose of thinking. Reason itself reveals no truths. The truths which are revealed to us by means of reason, are revelations of the general nature of the absolute universe. If you think of reason in this way, then, my son, you are thinking reasonably, are world-wise, logical, and true. LETTERS ON LOGIC 307 TWENTY-THIRD LETTER (A) Although we know that there is no actual beginning, because we are living in the universe without beginning and end, still we mortals must always begin at a certain point. So I have begun one of my retrospects over the history of my subject with Plato, and at another time I have ended with Hegel, although before and after them there has been much philosophical thought. These two names are luminant points which throw their light over everything which is situated between them. The errors of our predecessors are just as useful for the purpose of illustration as their positive achievements. More even: the errors form the steps of a ladder which leads toward a universal world philosophy. We clamber up and down on it, pefhaps a little irregularly, but now- adays the crooked roads of an English park are preferred to the straight French avenues. It was an achievement on the part of the Socratic and Platonic schools to seek the good not in good specialties, but in general good as a "pure" or absolute thing, to search for virtue in general instead of virtues. But it was a mistake which prevented their success, to exaggerate the distinction between the special and the general. Ac- cording to Plato, the black and white horses canter over terrestrial pavements, but the horse in general, which is neither brown, black, nor white, neither as slender as a race horse nor as clumsy as a draft horse, cantered along in the Platonic "idea," in the ideal mists. Platonic logic lacked what is taught by our present, or if you pre- fer, future proletarian logic, viz., the general understand- ing of the interrelation of all things, the truth that in 308 LETTERS ON LOGIC spite of their individual differences all things belong together as individuals of the same genus. The logical relation between individual and genus stuck upside down in the brain of the noble Plato. He lived in a time which is similar to our own time in that the world of the gods of the ancients was in the same state of dissolution in which the Christian religions are today. Plato was as little satisfied with Grecian mythol- ogy as a basis for a reasonable explanation of the world, as we are with Christian mythology. He wanted to ascend to the universal truth, not by way of little tradi- tional stories, but by scientific philosophy. His intention was good, but his weak flesh wrestled with a task which required thousands of years for its solution. A while ago I said that it was that topsy-turvy view of religion as to the relation between the special and the general which thwarted Plato. Let me illustrate a little more in detail in what this religious topsy-turvydom con- sisted. Here we have wind., the waters of the seas, the rays of the sun, chemical and physical forces, forces of nature. These are specimens of the universal force of nature. These specimens were regarded with sober enough eyes by the Greeks, but the general nature sat high upon Olympus in the form of Zeus. In the same way, the Greeks were familiar with beautiful things, but beauty was an unapproachable goddess, Aphrodite. True, the philosopher no longer believed in the gods, but he was nevertheless still under the influence of transcendental concepts and thus he mystified the general under the name of the "idea.' The Platonic ideas, like the gods of the heathen, are mystifications of the general. Plato further- more shows himself as a descendant of polytheism ia LETTERS ON LOGIC 309 this: Although he clearly distinguished between virtue and virtuous things, between beauty and beautiful things, between truth and true things, yet he did not rise to the understanding that all generalities are amalgamated and unified in the absolute generality, that, in so far, the good, the true, and the beautiful are identical. The research for the absolute did not become monistic until Christian monotheism lent a hand. You will see from this that religion and philosophy form a common chapter which has the genus of all genera for its object. Faith is distin- guished from science in that the latter no longer bows to the dictates of imagination and of its organs, the priests, but seeks to fathom the object of its studies by the exact use of the intellect. A partial amalgamation of the two is, therefore, quite natural. "When a woman is strong, isn't she strong after the same conception and the same strength? By the term same," says the Platonic Socrates, "I mean that it makes no difference whether the strength is in the man or in the woman." This quotation, taken from Plato's "Menon," shows that Platonic research deals with the general, in this case the general concept of strength which is the same in man or woman, ox or mule, Tom and Jerry. It is the genus by means of which black and white horses are known as horses, dogs and monkeys as animals, animals and plants as organisms, and finally the variations of the whole world as the universe, as the same. Plato has grasped this same- ness in a limited way, for instance in regard to strength, reason, virtue, etc. But that in an infinite sense everything is the same, that things as well as ideas, bodies, and souls, are the same, remained for radical proletarian logic to discover. 310 LETTERS ON LOGIC Hand in hand with the narrow Platonic conception of the general went a narrow theory of understanding or science, a wrong conception of the intellect and its func- tions. The Socratic Plato and the Platonic Socrates both call understanding by the name of "remembering." By praising understanding, they teach us that we must not believe the priests, but study by the help of our senses. But, nevertheless, they still teach a wrong method, a nar- row art of thought. In "Menon," the object of study is virtue. Socrates does not exactly pose as a schoolmaster. He knows that he is called the wisest of men, but explains that this is so, because others have a conceited opinion of their wis- dom, while his wisdom consists in humbly knowing that he knows nothing. He does not so much try to teach what virtue is, as to stimulate his disciples to search for it. But his idea of research is distorted. Among the immortal things which he transcenden- tally separates from mortal things, he also classifies the soul, "the immortal soul" which dies and lives again, and has always lived, knows everything, but must "remember." Thus his research becomes a cudgeling of the brain, an introspective speculation. He is not looking for under- standing by way of natural science, through the interre- lations of the world, but speculatively through the inside of the human skull. In order to make his theory of memory plain, Socrates in "Menon" calls an ignorant slave and instructs him in the fundamentals of geometry. He quickly succeeds in getting from the ignorant fellow, who at first gives wrong answers, the correct statements by recalling the connec- tions of thought by clever questioning. He thus demon- strates to his satisfaction that man has wisdom a priori LETTERS ON LOGIC 311 in his head. But the Socratic-Platonic art of logic has overlooked that such wisdom requires concepts which are fixed in memory by internal and external interrelations. The socalled immortal soul with its innate wisdom has troubled the world a good while thereafter. You must not think that I have a poor opinion of Plato, because I criticize him in this way. On the con- trary, I am highly delighted with his divine and immortal writings. "Honor to Socrates, honor to Plato, but still more honor to truth." I also assure you that I am a great admirer of natural science, but nevertheless I should like to show you that it indulges in narrow reasoning. Robert Mayer, the talented discoverer of the equiv- alent of heat, has proven that the force of gravitation, of electricity, of steam, of heat, etc., represents different modes of expression of the same force, of the force of nature in general. But no, not quite so ! He has ascer- tained the numerical relation by which the transformations of one force into another is accomplished. Thus a logical understanding sees that the various forces and force in general are distinguished in detail but identical in gen- eral. Darwin in his "Origin of Species" has accomplished a similar demonstration. But neither Mayer nor Darwin have given that general expression to world unity which is required by the art of logic. In order to become an adept at this art, you must rise to the understanding that all forces are various modes of expression of the one force, all animals and species transformations of animaldom', that on the moon a part is smaller than the whole, the same as on earth, that there as well as here fire burns, and that as surely as you have no doubt of your being, just as surely is there only one being, the infinite, divine 312 LETTERS ON LOGIC universe which has no other gods beside it, but contains all forces, materials, and transformations. This is an innate science which is the cause of all other science, an innate science which, indeed, must first be awakened in you by "memory." Hence our proletarian logic instructs you not to rack your brain by mere introspection, as the ancient philoso- phers used to do, not to call the senses impostors nor to search for truth without eyes, nose, and ears, nor on the other hand to start out with the idea of certain natural scientists who try to see, hear, and smell understanding without the help of the intellect. The mistake committed in making a wrong use of the intellect is a "sin against the holy ghost." The Socratic- Platonic doctrine of memory is one extreme side of this sin ; the other extreme side is represented by that modern science which tries to find truth by mere external means and rejects everything as untrue which is not ponderable or tangible. As this letter is more intimately connected with the following one than is ordinarily the case, I take the liberty to unite them under the same number and mark them with the letters A and B. m We are still the guests of Plato today, my son, and I should like to show you that this philosopher, in whose time natural science had barely developed its first downy feathers, already suspected its stubborn narrowness, al- though in a certain sense the Platonic logic was no less LETTERS ON LOGIC 313 narrow than that of the so-called exact sciences still is to-day, at least in part. Still Platonic logic had at least the advantage of its outlook toward the Supreme Being, the absolute, while modern naturalism is still stuck in the narrow land of specialties. Therefore, I hope that you will find it interesting to note with me the way in which universal truth is peeping forth beneath the wings of Pla- tonic speculation. "Listen, then, to what I am going to say," remarks Socrates in "Phaedo," paragraph 45. "In my youth, O Cebes, I had a great interest in natural science, for it seemed to me a magnificent thing to know the cause of everything, to learn how everything begins, exists, and passes. A hundred times I turned to one thing and then to another, reflecting about these matters by myself. Do animals arise when the hot and the cold begin to disinte- grate, as some claim ? Is it the blood, which enables us to think, or the air or the fire ? Or is it none of these, but rather the brain which produces all perceptions, such as seeing, hearing, smelling, and does memory and thought then arise by these, and from thought and memory, when they become adjusted, understanding? And again, when I considered that all this passes away, and the changes in heaven and on earth, I finally felt myself poorly quali- fied for this whole investigation. Let this be sufficient proof to you : In the things which formerly were familiar and known to me, I became so doubtful by this investiga- tion, that I forgot even that which I thought I knew of many other things, as for instance the question as to how man grows. I thought that everybody knew that this was caused by eating and drinking. For when through the food flesh comes to flesh and bone to bone, and in the same way that which is akin to all the rest of the things which 31-1 LETTERS ON LOGIC constitute man, it seemed natural that a> small mass would become larger, and thus a small man grow tall. Does not this appear reasonable to you? . . . Consider furthermore this. It seemed enough to me that a man appeared large when standing by the side of something small, that he looked taller by one head, and in the same way one horse by the side of another ; or what is still plainer, ten seemed to me more than eight, because it is more by two, and a thing of two feet longer than that which measures only one foot, because it exceeds it by one." Thereupon Cebes asks: "Well, and what do you think of this now ?" "I think, by Zeus," says Socrates, "that I am far re- moved from knowing the cause of any of these things. I do not even admit that by adding one to one I obtain two, by such an addition. For I wonder how it is that each was supposed to be one when by itself, while now, that they have been added to one another, they have become two. Neither can I convince myself that if one thing divides a thing in two, that this division is the cause of it becoming two. For this would be the opposite way of making two. But when I heard somebody reading some- thing from a book, written by Anaxagoras as he said, to the effect that it is reason which had arranged every- thing and was the cause of everything, I rejoiced at this cause. . . . Now if one were to search for the cause of all things, of their origin, existence and passing, he should only find out what is the best way to maintain their existence. . . . Hence it is not meet that man should care for anything else in regard to himself as well as to all other things, but for that which is best and most ex- cellent, and then he would also know the worst about LETTERS ON LOGIC 315 things, for the understanding of both is the same. Con- sidering this, I was glad to have found a teacher who knows about the cause of all things, who suited me, I mean Anaxagoras, and who would now tell me, first whether the earth is round or flat, and after telling me that, would also explain to me the necessity for it and the cause, by pointing to the fact that it was better that it should be so. And when he claimed that the earth was the center of things, I hoped he would explain why it was better that it should be the center, and when he had explained that, I was resolved that I would not ask for any other cause. In the same way I was going to in- quire after the cause of the sun, the moon, and the other stars, etc. . . . For I did not believe that after claim- ing all this to have been arranged by reason, he would be dragging in any other cause than that of being best to have it just so. And this wonderful hope I had to abandon, my friends, when I continued to read and saw that the man accomplished nothing by reason and adduces no other reasons relating to the arrangement of things, but quotes air, and water, and ether, and many other aston- ishing things. "And it seemed that it was as if some one said Socrates accomplishes all things by reason, and then, when he began to enumerate the cause of everything I do, were to say first that I am sitting here because my body con- sists of bones and sinews, and that the bones are hard and are differentiated by joints, and the sinews so con- structed that they can be extended and shortened, etc. And further, if he tried to name the causes of our dis- cussion, he would refer to other similar things, such as sound, and air and hearing, and a thousand and one other things, quite neglecting the true cause, viz., that it suited 316 LETTERS ON LOGIC the Athenians better to condemn me, and that it suited me for this reason to stay here and seemed more just to me to bear patiently the punishment which they have ordered. For I believe that my bones and sinews would have gone long ago to the dogs or been carried to the Boeotians, had I not considered it more just and beauti- ful to atone to the state than to flee. "It is very illogical, then, to name such causes. But if any one were to say that I should not be able to do what I please without these things (sinews and bones, and what- ever else I may have) , he would be right. But it would be a very thoughtless contention to say that these things are the cause of my actions, instead of my free choice to do the best. That would show an inability to distinguish the fact that in all things the cause is one thing, and an- other thing that without which the cause could not be cause. And it seems to me that it is precisely this which some call by a wrong name in considering it as the cause. For this reason some put a whirlwind from heaven round the earth and others rest it on air as they would a wide trough on a footstool.' So far Socrates, whose words I ask you to read re- peatedly and carefully, though they may look a little old- fashioned. This quotation is somewhat lengthy, but I thought best not to cut it too short and to present it in its main outlines. This quotation says on the whole the same thing which I have said in my preceeding letters. According to Socrates, all our thoughts and actions have a wider and more general purpose, which he- calls the "good/' so that we even do evil for the sake of good. A crime always aims at some particular good. Evil is misun- derstood good. Applied to natural science, this means LETTERS ON LOGIC 317 that it misunderstands the interrelation of all its fine dis- coveries. And this charge is true even to-day. Although the natural interrelations are more and more recognized from day to day, still the understanding of the absolute inter-connection continues to be overlooked, especially that of the intellect with material things, or of the ideal with the real. Natural science teaches after the manner of the gospel of John : Abraham begot Isaac, Isaac begot Jacob. But it forgets to teach that all these genitors were not genitors in the last analysis, but begotten by old Jehovah himself. The uncultivated condition of Grecian natural sciences may have been ground enough for So- crates to think little of it. We, on the other hand, have to-day good reasons for thinking highly of natural science, and for this very reason I take pains to illus- trate by its prominent example in what respect the ne- glect of the universal world thought results in a narrow conception of the world. We may well rejoice more lastingly than Socrates when natural science teaches us how it happens that everything has its origin, life, and end, because the knowl- edge of natural science has been far more enriched by modern experiences than it was at the time of Anaxa- goras. Nevertheless you must not stop learning further- more from logic that all growing, coming into existence, living, and passing away is but a change of form. The causes of natural science are indeed not causes, but ef- fects of the universe. They are reasonable effects of reason in so far as the latter is not an isolated part, but interconnected with the universe. To repeat: Our in- tellect is not ours, it does not belong to man, but it to- gether with man belongs to the universe. Reason and the world, the true, the good, and the beautiful, together 318 LETTERS ON LOGIC with Godhood which you shall not idolize but under- stand in the spirit and in the world, in truth and in reality, are all one thing, one being, and everywhere eternal and the same. Socrates shows that he has as yet only a narrow an- thropomorphic, not a cosmic conception of the "best and good" and of reason. He was dominated by the preju- dice which still holds sway over the uncultured believers in God, that reason is older than all the rest of the world, that it is the ruling and antecedent creator. Our concep- tion of logic, on the other hand, teaches that the spirit which we have in our brain is but the emanation of the world spirit. And this latter must not be conceived as a nebulous world monster, not as an enormous spirit, but as the actual universe, which in spite of all change and all variation is eternally one, true, good, reasonable, real, and supreme. TWENTY-FOURTH LETTER The art of thought, my son, for which we are striv- ing, is not pure and abstract, but connected with prac- tice, a practical theory, a theoretical practice. It is not a separate and isolated thing, not a "thing in itself," but is connected with all things ; it has a universal interrela- tion. Hence our logic, as we have repeatedly stated, is a philosophy, world wisdom, and metaphysics. I include the latter, because our logic excludes nothing, not even the transcendental. It teaches that everything, even transcendentalism, if practiced with consciousness and the necessary moderation, and at- the right time and place, LETTERS ON LOGIC 319 for instance at the carnival, is a reasonable and sublime pleasure. All prominent philosophers were explorers and users of the same art of thought, of living-, of viewing the world, although many of them retired to the solitude and were ascetics. Can the world be understood in a hermi- tage? Yes and no. After you have been traveling and seeing many lands, it is well to retire and classify the impressions received, and thus to reflect about a true philosophy of life. In this way, secluded thought, in the relative meaning of the word, that is, in connection with observation and experience, with enjoyment and life, is a veritable savior. Body and soul belong together, and if they are separated, it must be remembered that such a separation is a mere matter of form, that they are in fact one thing, attributes of the same being which is in- finitely great, so great that all other beings are but its fringes. The art of distinction distinguishes the infinite in- finitely with the consciousness that in reality everything is interrelated without distinction and is one. This truth, and thus absolute truth, is ignored by lay- men and professional authorities alike. The thousand year dualism between body and soul has been especially instrumental in preventing the understanding of the uni- versal interrelation. The whole history of philosophy is but a wrestling with the dualism between matter and mind. It was only by degrees that it moved towards its monistic goal. After the brilliant triple star Socrates-Flato-Aris- totle was extinguished, the philosophical sky was covered with dark clouds. The heathens stepped from the stage, and Christianity and the dogmas of its church predom- 320 LETTERS ON LOGIC inated the logic of men, until at last a new scientific light arose in the beginning of modern times. It was especially Cartesius and Spinoza who were most brilliant among the early thinkers that emancipated their minds slowly and under great difficulties. Spinoza, of Jewish descent, is especially interesting in his fight against narrow- mindedness and for a universal philosophy. He wrote an "Essay on the Improvement of the Intellect and on the Way by which it is best led to a true Understanding of Things." He, as well as we, was looking for the best way, the true way, the way of truth. He, as well as we, seeks to study and practice the fundamentals of the art of thought. He begins : "After experience has taught me that everything which the ordinary life offers is vain, and I have seen that everything which I feared is only good or bad in so far as the mind is moved by it, I finally resolved to investigate whether there is any true good — whether there is anything the discovery of which will forever se- cure continuous and supreme joy. What is most generally found in life, and what mankind regards as the highest good, may be reduced to three things, viz., wealth, honor, and sensual pleasure." After Spinoza has then uncovered the shadowy side and the vanity of these popular ideals, he calls them "un- safe by their very nature," while he is looking for "per- manent good," which is ''insecure only as regards its possession, but not in its nature." But how is that to be found ? "Here I shall say shortly what I mean by true good, and what is at the same time the highest good. In order to grasp this fully, we must remember that good or bad are only relative terms, and thus the same thing may be LETTERS ON LOGIC 321 called good or bad according to its relations, or on the other hand perfect or imperfect.' Spinoza, forestalling the object of his research, dis- covers that the true, supreme and permanent good is the "understanding of the unity" of the soul with the entire nature. "This then," he says, "is the goal which I am coveting." "To this end, we must study morals, philosophy, and the education of boys, and combine with this study the entire science of medicine, because health materially assists us in reaching our ideal. Neither must mechanics be neglected, because many difficult things are made easy by art. Above all we must strive to find a way for the improvement of the intellect." Here we have once more arrived at the pivotal point of our subject, my dear disciple. Who or what is the in- tellect, whence does it come from, whither does it lead? Answer : It is a light which does not shine within itself, but throws rays outside of itself for the illumination of the world. For this reason the science which has the faculty of understanding for its object, though a limited, is at the same time a universal science, a universal world wisdom. But isn't it a contradiction that a special science wants to be general world wisdom ? Is not general wisdom that which comprises all knowledge, all special science? Must I not know everything in order to be world wise? And how can any single brain assume to acquire all knowl- edge, to know everything ? Answer : It is impossible for you to know everything; but you can rise to the under- standing that your special wisdom and that of all others is a part of universal wisdom and form together a rela- tive whole which in connection with all the rest of the 322 LETTERS ON LOGIC world constitute the absolute being. This understand- ing represents pure logic and is universal understand- ing, understanding of the universal being. Do not be troubled by the fact that Socrates was look- ing for virtue and the "best," or Spinoza for permanent and supreme joy, and that their wisdom aimed only at the narrow circle of human life, without rising to the cosmic interrelation. The means and the instrument by the help of which they strive for their ideal is the intel- lect. It is quite natural that intellectual research led to the study of the intellect, to the "improvement of the intellect," to the "critique of reason," to "logic," and finally to the understanding that the faculty of thought is an inseparable part of the monistic whole, of the ab- solute which lends support, consistency, reason and sense to all thought. On his exploring tour for the improvement of the in- tellect, Spinoza picks up a remark which seems to me worthy of closer attention. He says in so many words: If we are looking for a way to improve the intellect, is it not necessary for the purpose of finding such a way to first improve the intellect, in order to be at all able to discern the way which leads to an improvement of the intellect, and so on without end? "We must have a hammer to forge the iron, and in order to have a ham- mer, it must be made; but for this purpose we need another hammer and other instruments, and so forth without end. In this way it must not be proven that men have no power to forge iron. Men have rather ac- complished only the easiest tasks with difficulty and im- perfectly by the help of the natural tools of their bodies. Gradually they accomplished more difficult things with LETTERS ON LOGIC 323 less labor and better. And thus they slowly proceeded from the simplest tasks to the instruments." I admire in this process of reasoning the brilliant understanding that the hammer is not such a limited in- strument as the untrained human brain thinks. It thinks that a hammer is not a pair of tongs. But Spinoza says that the bare fist is a hammer when used for striking, much more a stone or a club. A pair of tongs used to drive a nail becomes a hammer ; a hammer which I use to draw a nail becomes a pair of tongs. Fist or club, sense or nonsense, all is one. In other words, things are separated, but never so far as the fantastical dreamers think. Just as hammer and tongs, saw and file, are parts of the class of tools, so all things are parts of the one and absolute universe. Recognize, then, dear Eugene, that the relative and the absolute are not sepa- rated by such a bridgeless chasm, that the one should be praised to the skies and the other damned to the lowest pit. Understand that everything is dialectically inter- related, that the infinite, eternal, divine, can live only in the finite, special things, and that on the other hand the parts of the world can exist only in the absolute. In short, raise your conception to the universal conception, and at the same time, understand the supreme being in all its parts instead of idolizing it. The Positive Outcome of Philosophy BY JOSEPH DIETZGEN Translated by Ernest Untermann THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OF PHILOSOPHY PREFACE As a father cares for his child, so an author cares for his product. I may be able to give a little additional zest to the contents of this work by adding an explanation how I came to write it. Although born by my mother in 1828, I did not enter my own world until "the mad year," 1848. I was learn- ing the trade of my father in my paternal shop, when I saw in the "Kolnische Zeitung," how the people of Ber- lin had overcome the King of Prussia and conquered "liberty." This "liberty" now became the first object of my musings. The parties of that period, the disturbers and howlers, made a great deal of fuss about it. But the more I heard about it, and hence became enthusiastic over it, the duller, hazier and more indistinct became the meaning of it, so that it turned things upside down in my head. The psychologists have long known that en- thusiasm for a cause and understanding of that cause are two different things. Mark, for instance, the zeal dis- played by Catholic peasants in singing their mass, al- though they do not understand a word of Latin. What is meant by political freedom? What is its beginning, what its end ? Where and how are we to find a positive and definite knowledge of it? In the parties of 327 THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OF PHILOSOPHY the middle, the so-called "constitutionals," as well as among the bourgeois democrats, there was no end of dissension. Nothing could be learned there. Among them, as among the Protestants, every one was a chosen interpreter of the gospel. However, the papers of the extremes, that is, the "Neue Preussische" with its "For God, King and Father- land." and the "Neue Rheinische," the organ of "Dem- ocracy." gave me a hint that liberty had some sort of a material basis. During the following years, my life in rural surroundings gave me leisure to follow this scent. On one side, it was the work of men like Gerlach, Stahl, and Leo, on the other of Marx and Engels, that gave me a foothold. Though the communists and the ultra-conservatives came to widely different conclusions, still I felt and read between the lines that both of these extreme parties based their demands on one fundamental premise. They knew what they wanted ; they both had a definite beginning and end. And that permitted the assumption that both had a common philosophy. The Prussian landholding aris- tocracy based the cross, which they wore as an emblem on their hats, on the historically acquired royal military power and on the positive divine revelation of the Bible printed in black and supported by the ecclesi- astical police force dressed in black. And the Communist point of departure was quite as positive, unquestionable and material, viz., the growing supremacy of the mass of the people with their proletarian interests based on the historically acquired productive power of the working class. The spirit of both of these hostile camps was de- scending from the results of philosophy, primarily from the Hegelian school. Both of them were armed with the PREFACE 329 philosophical achievements of the century, which they had not only mechanically assimilated, but rather con- tinually provided with fresh food like a living being. In the beginning of the fifties, a pamphlet was pub- lished by one of the cross bearers, Stahl, entitled "Against Bunsen." This Bunsen was at the time the Prussian Em- bassador at London, a crony of the ruling Prussian King Frederic William IV., and, apart from this, nothing but a liberal muddle head who was interested in political and religious tolerance. The pamphlet of the cross bearer Stahl attacked this tolerance and demonstrated valiantly that tolerance could be preached only by a muddled free lance to whom religion and fatherland were indifferent conceptions. Religious faith, so far as it is truth, so he said, has a true power and can transpose mountains. Such a faith could not be tol- erant and indifferent, but must push its propaganda with fire and sword. In the same way in which Stahl defended the inter- ests of the landed aristocracy, the philosopher Feuerbach spoke in the interest of the infidel revolutionaries. Both of them were to that extent in accord with the "Com- munist Manifesto" that they no longer regarded Liberty as a phantasmagoria, but as a being of flesh and blood. When I had realized this, it dawned upon me that any conception elucidated by philosophy, in this case the idea of liberty, had this peculiarity : Liberty is as yet an abstract idea. In order to become real, it must assume a concrete, special form. Political freedom as a glittering generality is a thing of no reality. Under such fantastic ideal the constitu- tionalists or the liberals conceal the liberty of the money bag. Under these circumstances, they are quite right in 330 THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OF PHILOSOPHY demanding German unity with Prussia as a head, or a republic with a grand duke at the top. The landed aris- tocracy also are right in demanding the liberty of that aristocracy. And the Communists are still more right, for they demand the liberty that will guarantee bread and butter for the mass of the people and will fully set free all the forces of production. From this experience and conclusion it follows that true liberty and the highest right are composed of in- dividual liberties and rights, that are opposed to one an- other without being inconceivable. It is easy to proceed from this premise to the rule of thought laid down in this work, that the brain need not make any excursions into the transcendental in order to find his way through the contradictions of the real world. In this way I passed from politics to philosophy, and from philosophy to the theory of positive knowledge which I presented to the public in 18G9 in my little work "The Nature of Human Brain Work." Further studies on the general powers of understanding have added to my special knowledge of this subject, so that I am now enabled to fill the old wine into a new bottle instead of publishing a new edition of my old work. The science which I present in the following pages is very limited in its circumference, but all the better founded and important in its consequences. This, I trust, will be accepted as a sufficient excuse for the recurring repetition of the same statements in a different form. My remaining confined to a single point requires no apology. What is left undone by one, is bequeathed as a problem to others. There might be some dispute over the question, how much of this positive achievement of philosophy is due PREFACE 331 to the author and to his predecessors. But that is an in- terminable task of small concern. No matter who hoisted the calf out of the well, so long as it is out. Anyway, this whole work treats of the concatenation and inter- dependence of things, and this also throws a bright light on the question of mine and thine. J. DlETZGEN. Chicago, March 30, 1887. THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OF PHILOSOPHY i POSITIVE KNOWLEDGE AS A SPECIAL OBJECT That which we call science nowadays was known to our ancestors by a name which then sounded very re- spectable and distinguished, but which has in the mean- time acquired a somewhat ludicrous taste, the name of wisdom. This gradual transition of wisdom into science is a positive achievement of philosophy which well de- serves our attention. The term "ancestors" is very indefinite. It comprises people who lived more than three thousand years ago as well as those who died less than a hundred years ago. And a wise man was still respected a hundred years ago, while to-day that title always implies a little ridicule and disrespect. The wisdom of our ancestors is so old that it has not even a date. It reaches back, the same as the origin of language, to the period when man developed from the animal world. But if we call a wise man, in the language of our day, a philosopher, then it is at once plain that wisdom is descended from the ancient Greeks. This wonderful nation produced the first philosophers. Whether this term indicates a man who loves wisdom or one who loves science, is of little moment to-day, and 334 THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OF PHILOSOPHY there was no such distinction in ancient times. We re- member that it was entirely undecided among the Greeks whether a mathematician, an astronomer, a physician, an orator, or a student of the art of living deserved the title of a philosopher. These professions were not clearly distinguished. They were wrapped up one in another like the embryo in a mother's womb. While humanity had still little knowledge, a man might well be wise. But to-day it is necessary to specialize, to devote one's self to a special science, because the field of exploration has grown so extended. The philosopher of to-day is no longer a wise man, but a specialist. The stars are the objects of astronomy, the animals of zoology, the plants of botany. Who and what are now the objects of philosophy? This may be explained in one word to an expert. But if we try to give informa- tion to the general public, the matter becomes difficult. What do I know about the shoe industry, if I know that it produces shoes ? I know something general about it, but I have no knowledge of its details. It is impossible to give sufficient information on the details of shoemak- ing to any one in a few words, not even to an educated person. Neither is it possible to explain the object of philosophy in such a way. The object may be stated, but not explained, for it cannot be made plain and brought home to the understanding in a few words. That is the word, understanding. The understand- ing is the object of philosophy. We must at once call the reader's attention to the ambiguity of this term. Understanding, knowledge, is the object of all science. That is nothing special. Every study seeks to enlighten the brain. But philosophy wishes to be a science and does not desire to relapse into POSITIVE KNOWLEDGE AS A SPECIAL OBJECT 335 antiquity by becoming universal wisdom. To say that understanding is the object of philosophy is to give merely the same reply which Thales, Pythagoras, or Plato would have given. Has proud philosophy gained nothing since? What is its positive achievement? That is the question. Philosophy to-day still has understanding for its ob- ject. But it is no longer indefinite understanding which tries to embrace everything, but rather the understanding of the method by which knowledge may be gained. Philosophy now wishes to learn how it comes to pass that other objects may be illumined by the mind. To speak plainly, it is no longer the understanding which seeks to know everything as it did at the time of Socrates that is now the special study of philosophy, but rather the mind itself, its method and the perceptive powers of thought and understanding. If this were all, if the world's wise men had done nothing but to at last find the object of philosophy, it would be a very scanty achievement. No, the harvest is much richer. The present day theory of human under- standing is a real science, which well deserves to be popularized. Our ancestors sought understanding after the manner of Socrates and Plato in the entrails of the human brain, while at the same time despising the ex- perience outside of it. They hoped to find truth by cudgeling their brain. "Honor to Socrates, honor to Plato ; but still more honor to Truth !" Aristotle showed a little more interest in the outer world. With the downfall of the old social stage the old philosophy naturally succumbed also. It did not revive until a few hundred years ago, at the beginning of mod- ern times. 336 E POSITIVE outcome of philosophy A short while ago, Shakespeare attracted much atten- tion, when some one claimed to have discovered that it was not he who wrote those famous dramas and trage- dies, but his contemporary Bacon of Verulam, Lord Chancellor of England. Whether Shakespeare keeps his laurels or not, Bacon's name is still great enough, for it is generally accepted as the mile stone of modern philosophy. One might say that philosophy was asleep from the time of Aristotle to that of Bacon. At least it produced no remarkable results during that period, and it- cannot be denied that philosophy from ancient Greek days to the present times moved in a mystic fog which detracted much from its study in the eyes of educated and honest men. But the philosophers themselves are less to blame for this than the concealment of the object. Only after the entire social development has furthered the human understanding to the point where it can benefit from the light spread by the various branches of science, does philosophy become conscious of its special object and able to separate its positive achievements from the rub- bish of the past. If we compare the old Grecian wisdom with modern science, the outcome of philosophy looks insignificant by the side of the achievements of science. Nevertheless, great as the value of the aggregate product of science may be, it is composed of individual values, and every one of its parts is worthy of consideration. The method, the way, the form, in which the mind arrives at its prac- tical creations is one of these parts. The mind, on its march from ignorance to its present wealth has not only gathered a treasury of knowledge, but also improved its methods, so that the further constructive work of sci- POSITIVE KNOWLEDGE AS A SPECIAL OBJECT 837 ence proceeds faster now. Who will fail to recognize that material production has accumulated a treasure in the methods by which it produces to-day, which is by no means of less value than the accumulated national wealth itself? The positive outcome of philosophy bears the same relation to the v/ealth of science. II THE POWER OF COGNITION IS KIN TO THE UNIVERSE The way of Truth, or the true way, is not musing, but the conscious connection of our thoughts with the actual life — that is the quintessence of the teachings of phi- losophy produced by evolution. But this is not every- thing. If I know that a tanner makes leather, I do not by any means know everything he does, because there still remains the manner and method of his manipulations. In the same way, the doctrine of the interrelation of mind and matter, which is the product of the entire so- cial development, requires a better and more specific substantiation, so that its true quality as a positive achievement of philosophy, or of the theory of knowledge may be better understood. If the matter is represented in this bare manner — it does, indeed, resemble the egg of Columbus — one does not see why so much should be made of it. But if we enter into the details that have produced the result, we do not only learn to better re- spect the prominent philosophers, but their works also reveal a rich mine of fecial and comprehensive knowl- edge. 338 THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OF PHILOSOPHY All sciences are closely related, for advances in one branch are preparations for advances in others. As- tronomy is unthinkable without mathematics and optics. Every science has begun unscientifically, and in the course of the accumulation of individual knowledge a more or less exact systematic organization of this knowl- edge has resulted. Xo science has as yet arrived at com- pleteness and perfectness. We have as yet more the results of experimental effort than accomplished perfec- tion. Philosophy is no better off in this respect. We rather believe we are doing something to overcome a deeply rooted prejudice when we state that philosophy is no worse off than other sciences, so long as we suc- ceed in ascertaining that it has accomplished positive results and in pointing them out. It is a positive accomplishment of philosophy that mankind to-day has a clear and unequivocal conception of the necessity of the division of labor as a means of being successful. Our present day philosophers no longer make excursions into dreamland in the quest of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good, as did the ancients. The True, the Beautiful, and the Good, are nevertheless the objects of all modern science, only, thanks to evolu- tion, these objects are now sought by special means. And the clear consciousness of this condition of things is a philosophical consciousness. It is a part of the theory of understanding to know that in order to accomplish something one must limit oneself to a specialty. That is a fundamental demand for the use of common sense, which the primitive musing brain did not realize. Thinking must be done with wide open and active eyes, with alert senses, not with closed eyes or fixed gaze. This is a part of logic. We do not THE POWER OF COGNITION 339 deny that men have always done their thinking by means of the senses. We only claim that they did not do so from principle, otherwise the old complaint about the un- reliability of the senses as a means of knowledge would not have lived so long. Neither would the inner man have been so excessively overestimated, nor abstract thought so much celebrated, just as if it alone were the child of nobler birth. I do not wish to detract from the merits of the power of abstraction, but I simply claim that the clay of which Adam was made was no less divine than the spiritual breath that gave him his life. Nor do I mean that it is due to philosophy alone that mankind learned not to strain "understanding" in abstract vapor- ings, but instead to introduce the division of labor and to take up the various specialties with open senses. The technique of understanding is the product of the entire movement of civilization, and as such a positive accom- plishment of philosophy. The total process of evolution has placed the philosophers on their feet. There is no doubt that up to the present time, phi- losophy partook more of the character of a desire and love of science than of world wisdom. This wisdom does not amount to much, even to-day. This is plainly demon- strated by the dissensions of the educated and unedu- cated on all questions pertaining to wisdom of life. Soc- rates in the market of Athens, and Plato in his dialogues, have probably said better things about the questions: "What is virtue? What is justice? What is moral and reasonable?" than the professors of philosophy would know how to say to-day. Kant has well said that the unanimity of the experts is the test by which one may decide what is a scientific fact and what is mere dispute. From this it is easy to judge that wisdom of life is still 310 THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OF PHILOSOPHY in a bad way and will have to wait for its scientific transformation. We declared understanding itself to be the special object of philosophy and shall now attempt to outline the results so far obtained by it. One of the first requirements for the education of the object of philosophy is to recall its various names. The understanding, or the power of knowledge, is also called intelligence, intellect, mind, spirit, reason, power of cognition, of conception, of distinction, of imagination, of judgment, and of drawing conclusions. The attempt has frequently been made to analyze understanding or to dissect it into its various parts and to specialize them by the help of those names. Especially logic knows how to give particular explanations of what is imagination, a conception, a judgment, and a conclusion. It has even divided these sections into subsections, so that a trained logician might reproach me with being ignorant for ap- plying various names to intelligence, because only the common people confound those names and use them as synonyms, while science has long used them in their proper order for designating special parts of intelligence. To such a reproach, I answer that Aristotle and the subsequent formal logicians have made some pretty pointed observations and excellent arrangements in this field. But these proved to be premature or inadequate, because the observations on which the ancient intellec- tual explorers relied were too scanty. This scantiness of the observations made in regard to intelligence, and by intelligence, has kept the human race in the mazes of intellectual bondage and by this mysticism has even pre- vented the most advanced minds from penetrating deeper into this obscure question. The history of philosophy is THE POWER OF COGNITION 341 not the history of a useless struggle, but yet a history of a hard struggle with the question: What is, what does, of what parts consists, and of what nature is understand- ing, intelligence, reason, intellect, etc. ? So long as this question is unsettled, the questioner is entitled to dis- pense with any and all sections and subsections of the in- tellectual object and to regard the various names as synonymous. The main accomplishment in the solution of this ques- tion is the ever clearer and preciser knowledge of our days that the nature of the human intellect is of the same kind, genus or quality as the whole of nature. In order that the theory of understanding may be able to eluci- date this point, it must divest itself, more or less, of the character of a speciality and occupy itself with all of nature, assume the character of cosmogony. It is principally an achievement of philosophy that we now know definitely and down to the minutest detail that the human mind is a definite and limited part of the unlimited universe. Just as a piece of oak wood has the twofold quality of partaking not alone, with its oaken nature, of the general nature of wood, but also of the unlimited generality of all nature, so is the intellect a limited specialty, which has the quality of being universal as a part of the universe and of being conscious of its own and of all universality. The boundless universal cosmic nature is embodied in the intellect, in the animal as well as in man, the same as it is embodied in the oak wood, in all other wood, in all matter and force. The worldly monistic nature which is mortal and immortal, limited and unlimited, special and general, all in one, is found in everything, and every- 342 THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OF PHILOSOPHY thing is found in nature — understanding or the power of knowledge is no exception. It is this twofold nature of the universe, this being at the same time limited and unlimited, this reflection of its eternal essence and eternal truth in changing phe- nomena., which has rendered its understanding very dif- ficult for the human mind. This intricate quality has been represented by religion in the fantastic picture of two worlds, separating the temporal from the eternal, the limited from the unlimited, too unreasonably far. But nowadays the indestructibility of matter and the eternity of material forces is a matter of fact accepted by natural science. The positive outcome of philosophy, then, is the knowledge of the monistic way in which the seeming duality of the universe is active in the human under- standing. Ill AS TO HOW THE INTELLECT IS LIMITED AND UNLIMITED Understanding taught by experience no longer muses about universal nature, but acquires a knowledge of it by special studies. By degrees philosophy, first uncon- sciously and lately clearly and plainly, has taken up the problem of ascertaining the limits of understanding. This philosophical problem first assumed the form of polemics. It became opposed to the religious dogma which represented the human mind as a small, subser- vient, limited and restricted emanation of the unlimited divine spirit. This terrestrial emanation was regarded INTELLECT LIMITED AND UNLIMITED 343 as too limited to understand and find its divine source. The study of the limits of the understanding has now emancipated itself from this dogma, but not to such an extent that there is no longer any mysterious obscurity floating around the understanding and intelligence, and especially around the question whether the human mind can penetrate only into some things while others will re- main in the unscrutable darkness of faith and intuition, or whether it may penetrate boldly and without hind- rance into the infinity of the physical and chemical uni- verse. We here desire to claim as a positive outcome of philosophy that it has at last acquired the clear and ex- act knowledge that a socalled infinite spirit, in the re- ligious sense, is a fantastic, unscientific conception. In the natural sense of the word, the human powers of understanding are universal and yet in spite of their universality they are, quite naturally, limited. The human understanding has its limits, why should it not? Only drop the illusion that a dark mystery is concealed beyond these limits. The understanding is a force among others, and everything that is located alongside of other things is limited and restricted by them. We can understand everything, but we can also touch, see, hear, feel, and taste everything. We also have the power of moving about, and other qualities. One art limits another, and yet each is unlimited in its own field. The various human powers belong together and constitute together the human wealth. Be careful not to separate the power of understanding from other natural powers. In a certain sense it must be separated, because it is the special object of our study, but it must always be 3-11 THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OF PHILOSOPHY remembered that such a separation has only a theoret- ical value. Just as our power of vision can see everything, so our understanding can grasp everything. Let us look a little closer at this statement. How can we see everything? Not from any single standpoint. In that sense our powers of vision are limited. But what is not visible in the distance, be- comes so on approaching nearer to it. What one eye cannot see, that of others can, and what is invisible to the naked eye. is revealed by the telescope and micro- scope. Nevertheless the vision remains limited, even though it ma}- be the sharpest, and armed with the best artificial means. Even if we regard all the eyes of the past and future generations of humanity as organs of the universal human vision, this vision still remains limited. Nevertheless, no one will complain about the limits of human power, because we cannot see sounds with our eyes or hear the light with our ears. The understanding of man is limited, just as his vision is. The eye can look through a glass pane, but not through a plate of iron. Yet no one will call any eye limited, because it cannot see through a block of metal. These drastic examples are very opportune, because there are certain wise men who reflectively lay their finger on their nose and call attention to the limits of our intellect in that sense, just as if the knowledge gained on earth by scientific means were only a nominal, not a real, understanding and know- ing. The human intellect is thus degraded to the posi- tion of a substitute of some "higher" intellect which is not discovered, but must be "believed" to exist in INTELLECT LIMITED AND UNLIMITED 345 the small head of a fairy or in the large head of an almighty being above the clouds. Would any one try to make us believe that there is a great and almighty eye that can look through blocks of metal the same as through glass? The idea of a spiritual organ with an infinite understanding is just as senseless. An unlimited single thing, an unlimited single being, is impossible, unless we regard the whole world, the world without beginning and without end, the infinite world, as a unit. Within this world everything is sub- ject to change, but nothing can go beyond its genus without losing its name and character. There are various kinds of fire, but none that does not burn, none which has not the general nature of fire. Neither is there any water without the general nature of water, nor a spirit that is elevated above the general nature of spirits. In our days of clear conceptions the ten- dency toward the transcendental is mere fantastic vaporing. It is not alone unscientific, it is fantastic, to think even afar of a higher power of thought or understand- ing than the human one. One might as well think of a higher horse which runs with eight, sixteen, or six- teen hundred legs and carries away his rider in a higher air at a higher speed than that of the wind or the light. It is a part of the achievements of philosophy, of correct methods of thought, of the art of thought or dialectics, to know that we must use all conceptions, without exception, in a limited, rational, commonplace way, unless we wish to stray into that region where there are mountains without valleys and where every theory of understanding loses its mind. :;ii; THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OF PHILOSOPHY It is true that all things, including our understand- ing, may be improved. Everything develops, why should not our intellects do so? At the same time we may know a priori that our intellect must remain limited, of course not limited in the sense of the dunce, just as our eyes will never become so sharp that they can see through metal blocks. Every individual has its limited brain, but humanity, so the positive achieve- ments of philosophy have shown, has an intellect of as universal a power as any that can be imagined, re- quired, or found, in heaven or on earth. YYe maintain that philosophy so far has acquired something positive, has left us a legacy, and that this consists in a clear revelation of the method of using our intellect in order to produce excellent pictures of nature and its phenomena. For the purpose of making the reader familiar with this method, with this legacy of philosophy, we must enter more closely into the essence of the instrument which lifts all the treasures of science. We are espe- cially interested in the question, whether it is a finite or infinite and universal instrument with which we go fishing for truth. It is the custom to belittle the facul- ties of the human understanding, in order to keep it under the supremacy of the divine metaphysical augurs. It is quite easy to see, therefore, that the question of the essence of our powers of understanding is intimately related to, or even identical with, the question of how we may be permitted to use them, whether they should be used only for the investigation of the limited, finite, or also for the study of the eternal, infinite, and immeasurable. We object here to the tendency of belittling the INTELLECT LIMITED AND UNLIMITED 347 human mind. About a hundred years ago, the philos- opher Kant found it appropriate to draw the sword against those who played fast and lose with the human mind, against the socalled metaphysicians. They had made a miraculous thing of the instrument of thought, a matter for effusions. In order to be able clearly to state the outcome of philosophy, we must acquaint the reader with the fact that this instrument of thought, in its way, is one of the best and most magnificent things in existence, but that, at the same time, it is bound to its general kind or genus. The human understanding perceives quite perfectly, but we must not have an exaggerated idea of its perfection, any more than we would of a perfect eye or ear, that, be they ever so per- fect, cannot see the grass grow or hear the fleas cough. God is a spirit, says the bible, and God is infinite. If he is a spirit, an intellect, such as man, then it would be fair to assume that man's intellect is also infinite, or even is the divine spirit itself which has taken up its abode in the human brains. People cudgeled their brains with such confused conceptions, so long as the object of modern philosophy, the intellect, was a mys- tery. Now it is recognized as a finite, natural phe- nomenon, an energy or a force which is not the infinite, though it is, like all other matter and force, a part of the infinite, eternal, immeasurable. Leaving all religious notions aside, the infinite, im- measurable, eternal, is not personal, but objective; it is no longer referred to as a masculine, but as a neuter. It may be called by many names, such as the universe, the cosmos, or the world. In order to understand clearly that the spirit which we have in our minds, is a finite part of the world, we must get a little better 348 THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OF PHILOSOPHY acquainted with this infinite, eternal world. Our physical world cannot have any other world beside it,* because it is the universe. Within the universe there are many worlds, which all of them make out the cosmos, which has neither a beginning nor an end in time and space. The cosmos reaches across all time and space, "in heaven and on earth, and everywhere." But how do 1 know what I state in such an offhand manner? Well, the knowledge of the universe, of the infinite, is given to us partly by birth and partly by experience. This knowledge is inherent in man just as language is, viz., in the germ, and experience gives us a proof of the infinite in a negative way, for we never learn the beginning or the end of anything. On the contrary, experience has shown us positively that all socalled beginnings and ends are only interconnections of the infinite, immeasurable, inexhaustible, and un- fathomable universe. Compared to the wealth of the cosmos the intellect is only a poor fellow. However, this does not prevent it from being the most perfect instrument for clearly and plainly reflecting the finite phenomena of the infinite universe. IV THE UNIVERSALITY OF NATURE The positive outcome of philosophy concerns itself with specifying the nature of the human mind. It shows that this special nature of mind does not occupy an exceptional position, but belongs with the whole of nature in the same organization. In order to show THE UNIVERSALITY OF NATURE 349 this, philosophy must not discuss the human mind as if it were something separate from nature, but must rather deal with its general nature. And since this general nature of our intellect is the same of which every other thing partakes, it follows that nature in general, or the universe, or the cosmos, all of which is the same thing, are an indispensable object in the special study of the nature of the human mind. We have already said that the experienced under- standing of the present day no longer muses over nature in general in the fantastic and mere introspec- tive manner as of old, but rather seeks to obtain a knowledge of it by special study. In so doing we do not forget that the study of specialties at the same time throws a light on the general relation of things, of which every species is but a part. Since the human mind is a part of the whole of nature, viz., that part which has the desire and longing to obtain a conception of all the other parts, and more than that, to understand the interconnection between the parts and the undivided and infinite whole, it is easy to comprehend the fact that the philosophers have occupied themselves so much with the most real and most perfect being. Whether this being was called God, or substance, or idea, or the absolute, or nature, or matter, all of these terms cannot prevent us today from approaching infinite nature with sober senses, in order to gain, by its help, a lifelike picture of the human intellect, which is not a mystical being, but a reasonable part of the same nature that lives rea- sonably and intelligibly in all other parts of nature. The inexperienced powers of distinction which did not understand their function, magnified the difference 350 THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OF PHILOSOPHY between the infinite and its finite phenomena out of nil proportion. Now that we have made the philo- sophical experience that the general as well as the special nature of the human intellect admits only of moderate and bounded distinctions, we arrive at the conclusion that the immeasurable, all-perfect, and eternal being- is composed of finite, commensurable, imperfect, and transient things in such a way that the universal being combines in itself all perfections as well as all imperfections. This contradictory uni- versal being, this nature to which all contradictory attributes may be simultaneously assigned, in a cer- tain sense puts the old rule to shame that you cannot at the same time affirm and deny the predicate of any subject. Nature comprises all and is all. Reason and unrea- son, being and not being, all these contradictions are contained in it. Outside of it there are no affirmations and no contradictions. Since the human mind eter- nally moves in affirmations and negations, in order to obtnin n clenr picture of things, it hns an interminable task in understanding the interminable object. Our brain is supposed to solve the contradictions of nature. If it knows enough about itself to renlize that it is not an exception from general nature, but a nat- ural part of the same whole — although it calls itself "spirit" — then it also knows and must know that its clearness can differ but moderately from the general confusion, that the solution of the problem cannot dif- fer materially from the problem itself. The contradic- tions are solved only by reasonable differentiation, only by the science of understanding which shows that extravagant differences are nothing but extravagant THE UNIVERSALITY OF NATURE 351 speculations. The human understanding inclines to exaggerations in its untrained state, and it is a relic of untrained habits to differentiate in an absolute man- ner the spiritual from the rest of nature, to make a too extravagant distinction between it and the physi- cal body. It is the merit of philosophy to have given us a clear doctrine of the use of the intellect, and this doctrine culminates in the rule not to make exagger- ated, but only graduated distinctions. For this pur- pose it is necessary to realize that there is only one being and that all other socalled beings are but minor expressions of the same general being, which we desig- nate by the name of nature or universe. In consequence of the human bent to exaggeration, the human understanding has been regarded as a being of a different nature from that of natural beings which exist outside of the intellect. But it must be remembered that every part of nature is "another" in- dividual piece of it, and, furthermore, that every other and different part is really nothing different but a uni- form piece of the same general nature. The thing is mutual : The general nature exists only in its many individual parts, and these in their turn exist only in, with and by the general cosmic being. Nature which is divided by the human understand- ing into East and West, South and North, and into a hundred thousand other named parts, is yet an undi- vided whole of which we may say with certainty that it has as many innumerable beginnings and ends as it is without beginning and end, as it is the infinite itself. It is well known that there is nothing new under the sun. Nothing is created, nothing disappears, and yet there is a continuous change. 353 THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OF PHILOSOPHY The brain of man has a right and a left side, a top and a bottom, a front and a back part, an interior and an exterior. And the innermost of the brain again has two sides or qualities, a physical and a spiritual. They are so little divided that the term brain has two mean- ings, designating now the physical brain, now its men- tal functions. In speaking here exclusively of the mind, we tacitly assume its inseparable connection with the physical body. The material brain and the mental brain are two brains that together make one. Thus two, three, four, or innumerable things are yet one thing. The human understanding was endowed by nature with the faculty of embracing the infinite variety of the universe as a unit, as a single conception. The unity of nature is as true and real as its multiplicity. To say that many are one and one many is not nonsense, but simply a truism which becomes clear when understanding the positive outcome of philosophy. A reader unfamiliar with this our product of phil- osophy still follows the habit of regarding the physi- cal body as something different from the mind. A dis- tinction between these two is quite justified, but this manner of classification must not be overdone. The reader should remember that he also is in the habit of regarding such heterogeneous things as axes, scissors, and knives as children of the same family by referring to them collectively as cutting tools. The outcome of philosophy now demands that we apply the same method to the object of our special study, the human brain. We must henceforth eschew all effervescent flights of imagination and regard the powers of the THE UNIVERSALITY OF NATURE 353 human mind as children of the same family as all other physical powers, whose immortal mother is the universe. The universe is infinite not alone in the matter of time and space, but also in that of the variety of its 'products. The human brains which it produces are likewise internally and externally of an infinite differ- entiation, although this does not prevent them from forming- a common group uniform in its way. To group the phenomena of nature, the children of the universe, in such a way by classes, families, and species that they may be easily grasped, that is the task of the science of understanding, the work and constitution of the perceiving human brain. To under- stand simply means to obtain a general and at the same time a detailed view of the processes and prod- ucts of the universe by grouping them in a fashion similar to that used for the vegetable kingdom by botany and for the animal kingdom by zoology. It goes without argument that we, the limited children of the unlimited universe, are able to solve this problem only in a limited way. However, this natural physical limitation of the human understanding must not be confounded with the abject misery which slavish and sentimental meta- physics attribute to it. The infinite universe is by no means niggardly in its gifts to the human understand- ing. It opens its whole depths to our intellectual understanding and perception. Our intellect is a part of the inexhaustible universe and therefore partakes of its inexhaustible nature. That part of nature which is known by the name of intellect is limited only to the extent that the part is smaller than the whole. 354 THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OF PHILOSOPHY V THE UNDERSTANDING AS A PART OF THE HUMAN SOUL The human intellect or understanding, the special object of all philosophy, is a part, and in our case the most prominent part, of the human soul. Gustav Theo- dore Fechner, a forgotten star on the literary firma- ment, posed the question of the soul in his time and attempted to answer it. In so doing he clothed the result of past philosophies in a peculiar garb which looked fantastic enough at first sight. He regards the outcome of philosophy merely as an individual product and he is so full of veneration for the ancient terms, such as immortal souls, God, Chistimiity, that he does not care to dismiss them, no matter how roughly he handles their essence. Fechner extends the possession of a soul to human beings, animals, plants stones, planets ; in short, to the whole world. This is simply saying that the human soul is of the same nature as all the rest of the world, or vice versa, that all natural things have the same nature as the human soul. Not only animals, but also stones and planets have something analogous to our human soul. Fechner is not fantastic at bottom, and yet how fantastical it sounds to hear him say : "I went out walking on a spring morning. The fields were green, the birds were singing, the dew sparkled, the smoke rose toward the clouds. Here and there a human be- ing stirred. A glory of light was diffused over it all. It was only a small piece of the Earth. It was only THE UNDERSTANDING OF THE SOUL 355 a short moment of its existence. And yet, as I took all this in with an ever-widening understanding, I felt not alone the beauty, but also the truth that it is an angel who is thus passing through the sky with his rich, fresh and blooming nature, his living face upturned to the heavens. And I asked myself how it is that man can ever become so stunted that he sees nothing but a dry clod in the Earth and looks for angels above and beyond it, never rinding them anywhere. But peo- ple call this sentimental dreaming." "The Earth is a globe, and what it is besides may be found in the museums of natural history." Thus writes Fechner. . Now there can be no objection to comparing the beautiful Earth and the stars around it with angels, any more than there can be to the lover calling his sweetheart an angel of God. The Earth, the Moon, and the stars are according to Fechner's terminology angelic beings with souls ; mediators between man and God. He knows very well that this is nothing but a matter of analogy and terminology, he is as atheistic as the most atheistic, but his fondness and reverence for the traditional terms lead him to attribute a soul to the material world and to give to this great and in- finite soul a divine name. If we waive this religious hobby of Fechner's, there still remains his peculiarity of using words and names in a symbolical sense. It is nothing but the old poetic way of calling a sweetheart's eyes heavenly stars and the stars of the blue heavens lovely eyes, which makes a snowy hill of a woman's breast, a zephyr of the wind, a nymph of a spring of water, and an erlking of an old willow tree. This poetic license has filled the whole dO() THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OF PHILOSOPHY world with good and evil spirits, mermaids, fairies, elfs, and goblins. This is not a bad way of speaking, so long as we keep in mind, like a poet, what we are doing and that we are consciously using symbolical terms. Fechner does this only to a certain extent. A little spleen re- mains in his brain. It is this spleen which I intend to deal with in the proper light, in order to thus demon- strate the outcome of philosophy. Fechner is not aware that his universal soul reflects only one half of our present outcome of philosophical study. The other half, which renders an understand- ing of the whole possible, consists in the perception that not only are all material things endowed with a soul, but that all souls, including the human ones, are ordinary things. Philosophy has not only deified the world and in- spired it with a soul, but has also secularized God and the souls. This is the whole truth, and each by itself is only a part. Apart from psychology, which treats of the indi- vidual human soul, there has lately arisen a "psychol- ogy of nations" which regards the individual souls as parts of the universal human soul, as individual pieces constituting an aggregate soul which, decidedly, is more than a simple aggregation of numbers. The soul of the psychology of nations has the same relation to the individual souls that modern political economy has to private economy. Prosperity in general is a dif- ferent question and deals with different matters than the amassing of wealth for your individual pocket. Granted that the national soul is essentially different from the individual soul, what would be the nature of THE UNDERSTANDING OF THE SOUL 357 the universal animal soul, including the souls of lions, tigers, flies, elephants, mice, etc.? If we now extend the generalization farther and include in our psychol- ogy the vegetable and the mineral kingdom, the vari- ous world bodies, our solar system, and finally the whole universe, what else could that signify than a mere rhetorical climax? Mere generalization is one-sided and leads to fan- tastical dreams. By this method one can transform anything into everything. It is necessary to supple- ment generalization by specialization. We wish to have the elephants separated from the fleas, the mice from the lice, at the same time never forgetting the unity of the special and the general. This sin of omis- sion has often been committed by the zoologists in the museums and the botanists in their plant collections, and philosophical investigators of the soul like Fech- ner have drifted into the other extreme of generaliza- tion without specialization. The positive outcome of philosophy, then, in its abstract outline, is at present the doctrine that the general must be conceived in its relation to its special forms, and these forms in their universal interconnec- tion, in their qualities as parts of nature in general. True, such an abstract outline reveals very little. In order to grasp its concrete significance, we must pene- trate into its details, into the special aspects of this doctrine. The title of "Critique of Reason," which Kant gave to his special study, is at the same time a fitting term for all philosophical research. Reason, the essential part of the human soul, raises the critique of reason, 358 THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OF 1'IIILOSOPHY the science of philosophy, to the position of the most essential part of psychology. But why do we call this the most essential part? Is not the material world and its understanding as essential as reason, as intellect, which bends to the task of exploring this world? Surely, it is, and I do not use the word essential in this sense. I call the in- tellect the most essential part of the soul, and the soul the most essential part of the world, only in so far as these parts are the special condition of all scientific study and because the investigation of the general nature of scientific study is my special object and pur- pose. Whether I endeavor to explain the general nature of scientific study, whether I investigate the in- tellect or the theory of understanding, it all amounts to the same thing. Let us approach our task once more from the side of Fechner's universal soul. With his extravagant animation of all things, with his plant, stone, and star souls, he can help us to prove that the general nature of that particle of soul which is called reason, intellect, spirit, or understanding, is not so extraordinarily dif- ferent from the general nature of stones or trees as the old time idealists and materialists were wont to think. As I said before, Fechner is a poet, and a poet sees similarities which a matter-of-fact brain cannot per- ceive. But at the same time we must admit that the matter of fact brain which cannot see anything but mere distinctions is a very poor brain. The philoso- phers before me have taught me that a good brain sees the similarities and the differences at the same time and knows how to discriminate between them. A sober poetry and the combination of poetic qualities THE UNDERSTANDING OF THE SOUL 359 with a comprehensive and universal levelheadedness and discrimination, these are the marks of a good head. Still the poorest as well as the most talented brains partake of the general brain nature, which con- sists in the understanding that like and unlike, general and special, are interrelated. The one is never without the other, but both are always together. If the distinction between men and stones is so trifling that a talented brain like Fechner's can justly speak of them both as being animated, surely the dif- ference between the body and soul cannot be so great that there is not the least similarity and community between them. However, this escaped Fechner's notice. Is not the air or the scent of flowers an ethe- real body? Reason is also called understanding, and it is a positive achievement of philosophy to have arrived at the knowledge that this understanding does not admit of any exaggerated distinctions. In other words, all things are so closely related that a good poet may transform anything into everything. Can natural science do as much? Ah, the gentlemen of that science are also progressing well. They transform dry substance into liquid, and liquid into gas ; they change gravity into heat and heat into mechanical power. And they are doing this without forgetting to discrim- inate, as happened to our Fechner. It is not enough to know that the body has a soul and the soul a body, not enough to know that every- thing has a soul. It is also necessary to discriminate between the peculiarities and details of the human, animal, plant, and other souls, taking care not to ex- 360 THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OF PHILOSOPHY aggerate their differences to the extreme of making them senseless. We do not intend to follow this theory of a univer- sal soul any further. Fechner declares himself that "it must be admitted at the outset that the whole question of a soul is a question of faith." . . t "Analogy is not a convincing proof." . . . "We can no more prove the existence of a soul than we can disprove it." However, from the time of Cartesius it has been an accepted fact in the world of philosophers that the con- sciousness of the human soul is the best proof of its existence. The most positive science in the world is the empirical self-observation of the thinking soul. This subject is the most conspicuous object imagin- able, and it is the positive outcome of philosophy to have given an excellent description of the life and actions of this soul particle called consciousness or understanding. If the understanding is a part of the human soul and this soul an evident and positive part of the uni- versal life, then, clearly, everything partaking of this life, such as pieces of wood and stones scattered around, is related to this soul. Individual human souls, national souls, animal souls, pieces of wood, lumps of stone, world bodies, are all children of the same common universal nature. But there are so many children that they must be classified into orders, classes, families, etc., in order to know them apart. On account of their likeness, the souls belong together in one class and the bodies in another, and each re- quires more detailed classification. Thus we finally arrive at the class of human souls forming a depart- THE UNDERSTANDING OF THE SOUL 361 ment by themselves, because they all have a common general character. The manufacturers know that the work of ten laborers produces more and is of a different quality than the work of a single laborer multiplied by ten. Likewise the general human soul, or any national soul, expresses itself differently from the sum of the various individual souls composing it. More even, the very individual soul differs at various times and places, so that the individual soul is as manifold as any national soul. "Has the plant a soul? Has the earth a soul? Have they a soul analogous to that of man? That is the question." Thus asks Fechner. Just as my soul of today has something analogous to my soul of yesterday, so it has also with the soul of my brother, and finally with the souls of animals, plants, stones, etc., proving that everything is more or less analogous. A herd of sheep is analogous to yonder flock of small, white clouds in the sky, and a poet has the license to call those small clouds little sheep. In the same way Fechner is justified in pro- pounding his theory of- a universal soul. Is it not necessary, however, to make a distinction between poetry and truth? My brother's soul and my own are souls in the true sense of the word, but the souls of stones — they are only so figuratively speaking. At this point I want to call the reader's attention to the fact that we must not pass lightly over the valua- tion of the difference between the true and the figura- tive sense of a word. Words are names which do not, and cannot, have any other function than that of symbolic illustration. 362 THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OF PHILOSOPHY My soul, yours, or any other, are only in conception the same souls. When I say that John Flathead has the same soul as you and I, my intention is simply to indicate that he has something which is common to you and me and to all men. His soul is made in the image of our souls. But where shall we draw the line in this comparison of images? What is not an image in the abstract, and what is more than an image in the concrete? Truth and fiction are not totally different. The poet speaks the truth and true understanding partakes largely of the nature of poetry. Philosophy has truly perceived the nature of the soul, and especially that part of it with which we are dealing, that is, reason or understanding. This in- strument has the function of furnishing to our head a picture of the processes of the world outside of it, to describe everything that is around us and to analyze the universe, itself a phenomenon, with all its phe- nomena as a process of infinite variety in time and space. If this could be accomplished with the theory of a universal soul, then Fechner would be the greatest philosopher that ever was. But he lacks the under- standing that the intellect which has to combine all things within a general wrapper, must also consider the other side of the question, that of specification. That, of course, cannot be achieved by any philoso- pher. It must be the work of all science, and philos- ophy as a doctrine of science must acknowledge that. THE FACULTIES OF CONSCIOUSNESS 363 VI CONSCIOUSNESS IS ENDOWED WITH THE FACULTY OF KNOWING AS WELL AS WITH THE -FEELING OF THE UNIVERSALITY OF ALL NATURE In the historical course of philosophy, there has been much discussion as to where our knowledge comes from, whether any of it, or how much of it, is innate, and how much acquired by experience. With- out any innate faculties no knowledge could have been gathered with any "amount of experience, and without any experience even the best faculties would remain barren. The results of science in all departments are due to the interaction of subject and object. There could be no subjective faculty of vision un- less there were something objective to be seen. The possession of a faculty of vision carries with it the practical performance of seeing. One cannot have the faculty of vision without seeing things. Of course, the two may be separated, but only in theory, not in prac- tice, and this theoretical separation must be accom- panied by the recollection that the separated faculty is only a conception derived from the practical function. Faculty and function are combined and belong together. Man does not acquire consciousness, the faculty of understanding, until he knows something, and his power grows with the performance of this function. The reader will remember that we have mentioned as an achievement of philosophy the understanding of the fact that we must not make any exaggerated dis- tinctions. Hence we must not make any such distinc- 364 THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OF PHILOSOPHY tion between the innate faculty of understanding and the acquired knowledge. It is an established universal rule that the human intellect knows of no absolute separation of any two things, although it is free to separate the universe into its parts for the purpose of understanding. Xow. if 1 claim that the conception of the universe is innate in us, the reader must not conclude that I be- lieve in the old prejudice of the human intellect being like a receptacle filled with ideas of the true, the beau- tiful, the good, and so forth. Xo, the intellect can cre- ate its ideas and concepts only by self-production and the world around it must furnish the materials for this purpose. But such a production presupposes an innate faculty. Consciousness, the knowledge of being, must be present, before any special knowledge can be acquired. Consciousness signifies the knowledge of being. It means having at least a faint inkling of the fact that being is The universal idea. Being is every- thing; it is the essence of everything. Without it there cannot be anything, because it is the universe, the infinite. Consciousness is in itself the consciousness of the infinite. The innate consciousness of man is the knowledge of infinite existence. When I know that I exist, then I know myself as a part of existence. That this existence, this world, of which I am but a particle with all others, must be an infinite world, does indeed not dawn on me until I begin to analyze the concep- tion of being with an experienced instrument of thought. The reader, in undertaking this work with such an instrument, will at once discover that the conception of the infinite is innate to his conscious- THE FACULTIES OF CONSCIOUSNESS" 305 ness,* and that no faculty of conception is possible without this conception. The faculty of conception, understanding, thought, means above all the faculty of grasping the universal concept. The intellect cannot have any conception which is not more or less clearly or faintly based on the concept of the universe. Cogito, ergo sum. I think, therefore, I am. Whatever I imagine is there, at least in imagination. Of course, the imagined and the real thing are different, yet this difference does not exceed the limits of the universal existence. Creatures of fiction and real creatures are not so radically different that they would not all of them fit into the general gender of being. The man- ner, the form of being, are different. Goblins exist in fiction and Polish Jews exist in a tangible form, but they both exist. The general existence comprises the body and the soul, fiction and truth, goblins and Polish Jews. It is no more inconceivable that the faculty of uni- versal understanding should be innate in us than that- circles come into this world round, two mountains have a valley between them, water is liquid and fire burns. All things have a certain composition in them- selves, they are born with it. Does that require any explanation? The flowers which gradually grow on plants, the powers and wisdom that grow in men in the course of years, are no more easily explained than such innate faculties, and the latter are no more won- derful than those acquired later. The best explanation cannot deprive the wonders of nature of their natural marvelousness. It is a mistake to assume that the g., given with his consciousness. — Editor. 366 THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OF PHILOSOPHY faculty of explanation which is located in the human brain, is a destroyer of the belief in natural marvels. Philosophy which makes this faculty of explanation and the nature of its explanations the object of its spe- cial study gives us a new and much better understand- ing of this old miracle maker. It destroys the belief in metaphysical miracles by showing that physical nature is so universal that it absolutely excludes every other form of existence than the natural one from this world of wonders. I and many of my readers find in our brains the actual consciousness that this general nature of which the intellect is a part is an infinite nature. I call this consciousness innate, although it is acquired. The point that I wish to impress on the reader is that the difference generally made between innate and acquired qualities is not so extraordinary that the innate need not to be acquired and the acquired does not presup- pose something innate. The one contradicts the other only in those brains who do not understand the posi- tive outcome of philosophy. Such thinkers do not know how to make reasonable distinctions and exag- gerate in consequence. They have not grasped the conciliation of all differences and contradictions in uni- versal nature by which all contradictions are solved. Philosophy has endeavored to understand the in- tellect. In demonstrating the positive outcome of phil- osophy, we must explain that philosophical under- standing as well as any other does not rise out of the isolated faculty of understanding, but out of the uni- versal nature. The womb of our knowledge and understanding must not be sought in the human brain, but in all nature which is not only called the universe, THE FACULTIES OF CONSCIOUSNESS 3G7 but is actually universal. In order to prove this latter assertion, I refer to the fact that this conception, this consciousness of the infinite in the developed intellect, is in a manner innate. If the reader wishes to object to my indiscriminately mixing the innate faculty with the acquired understanding, I beg him to consider that I am endeavoring to prove that any and all distinction made by the intellect refers in reality to the insepar- able parts of the one undivided universe. From this it follows that the admired and mysterious intellect is not a miracle, or at least no greater marvel than any other part of the general marvel which is identical with the infinitely wonderful general nature. Some people love to represent consciousness as something supernatural, to draw an unduly sharp line of separation between thinking and being, thought and reality. But philosophy, which occupies itself particu- larly with consciousness, has ascertained that such a sharp contrast is unwarranted, not in harmony with the reality, and not a faithful likeness of reality and truth. In order to understand what philosophy has accom- plished in the way of insight into the function of the discriminating intellect, we must never lose sight of the fact that there is only a moderate distinction of degree between purely imaginary things and socalled real things. Neither the natural condition of our faculty of thought, nor the universality of general nature, permit of an exaggerated distinction between the reality of creations of imagination and of really tangible things. At the same time the exigencies of science demand clear illustrations and so we must distinguish between 368 THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OF PHILOSOPHY these two kinds of reality. It is true that in common usage the mere thought and the purely imaginary things are set apart from nature and reality as some- thing different and antagonistic. Yet the rules of lan- guage heretofore in vogue cannot prevent the spread of the additional knowledge that the universe, or gen- eral nature, is so unlimited that it can establish a con- ciliation between these limited antagonisms. The cat and the dog, for instance, are pronounced enemies, but nevertheless zoology recognizes them as being legiti- mate domestic companions. Human consciousness is. in the first place, indi- vidual. Every human individual has its own. But the peculiarity of my consciousness, of yours, and that of others, is that of being not alone the consciousness of the individual in question, but also the general con- sciousness of the universe, at least that is its possibility and mission. Xot every individual is conscious of the universality of general nature, otherwise there would be none of that distracting dualism. Nor would there be any necessity for volumes and volumes of philos- ophy to teach us that a limit, a thing, or a world out- side of the universal, is a nonsensical idea, an idea which is contrary to sense and reason. We may well say, for this reason, that our consciousness, our intel- lect, is only in a manner of speaking our own, while it is in fact a consciousness, an intellect belonging to universal nature. It can no more be denied that our consciousness is an attribute of the infinite universe than it can be denied that the sun, the moon and the stars are. Since this intellectual faculty belongs to the infinite and is its child, we must not wonder that this universal SPIRIT AND NATURE 369 faculty of thought is born with the capability of grasp- ing the conception of a universe And whoever does no longer wonder at this, must find it explicable, must realize that the fact of universal consciousness is thus explained. To explain the mysterious may be regarded as the whole function of understanding, of intellect. If we succeed in divesting of its mysteries the fact that the concept of an infinite universe is found in the limited human mind, we have then explained this fact itself and substantiated our contention that the things around us are explained by their accurate reflection in our brain. We summarize the nature of consciousness, its actions, life, and aims in these words : It is the science of infinite being; it seeks to obtain an accurate con- ception of this being and to explain its marvelousness. But we have by no means exhausted its life and aims in these words. With all the power of language, we can convey but a vague idea of the immensity of the object under discussion. Whoever desires to know more about it, must work for his own progress by observation and study. This much may be safely said : This question is no more mysterious than any other part of the general mystery. VII THE RELATIONSHIP OR IDENTITY OF SPIRIT AND NATURE "There is a natural law of analogy which explains that all things belonging to the universe are members of the same family, that they are related to one another 370 THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OF PHILOSOPHY by bonds which permit of the greatest variety in indi- vidual differences and are not nullified even by the dis- tance between extremes." If we grasp the meaning of these words in their full bearing, we recognize the outcome of philosophy up to date. They teach us how to use our intellect in order to obtain an accurate pic- ture of the universe. The intellect is also called by the name of faculty of discrimination. If in the science of the powers of this faculty we place ourselves on the standpoint of present-day natural knowledge, we possess the clear and plain insight that there are no exaggerated distinc- tions, no unrelated extremes, in the universe. The in- finite is related to the finite. For all developed and perishable things are the direct offspring of the imper- ishable, of the eternal universe. General nature and its special parts are inseparably interlaced. There is nothing among all that has a name which is funda- mentally different from other things known by name. There will hardly be any objection against these sentences, until we proceed to draw their last conse- quences. If alb things are related and without excep- tion children of the universe, it follows that mind and matter must also be two yards of cloth from the same piece. Hence the difference between human under- standing and other natural human faculties must not be magnified into that of irreconcilable extremes. In order to become accustomed to scientific dis- tinctions, the reader should consider that a man can remain under the sway of a belief in ghosts only so long as he ignores the relationship of all existing things. He believes in real ghosts whose reality is supposed to be radically different from his own. SucH SPIRIT AND NATURE 371 a distinction is exaggerated and illogical, and whoever believes in it does not know how to discriminate scien- tifically and has not the full use of his critical faculties. Just as common parlance opposes art to nature and then forgets that art is a part of nature, similarly as night is a part of day, so the language of the believer in ghosts does not know that reason and wood, mind and matter, in spite of all their differences, are two parts of the same whole, two expressions of the same universal reality. Everything is real and true, because in the last instance the universe is all, is the only truth and reality. So I call it a slip of the tongue to speak of natural nature as opposed to natural art or artificial nature, of imaginary reality as distinct from real real- ity. There ought to be a different name for the day of twelve hours than for the day of twenty-four hours, so that it might be better understood that day and night are not fundamentally different, but two prongs of the same fork. Just as the faculty of thinking is innate in the child, and grows with its development, so mankind's faculty of thought grows and has hitherto expressed itself in a language which gave only instinctive conceptions of the composition of the human brain and of its func- tions. The construction of languages explains in a way the condition of the human mind which had only inadequate knowledge of itself so far. Those short- comings of speech which I called slips of the tongue were not understood until sufficient progress had been made in the explanation of the process of thinking, and now these same shortcomings offer an excellent means of representing and demonstrating the results of en- lightenment. 372 THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OF PHILOSOPHY The mind is to give to man a picture of the world, the language is the brush of the mind. It paints by its construction the universal relationship of all things referred to in the beginning of this chapter, and it does so in the following manner : It gives to each thing not only its own name, but also adds to it another indicat- ing its family, and another indicating its race, another for the species, the genus, and finally a general name which proclaims that all things are parts of the. one indivisible unit which is called world, existence, uni- verse, cosmos. This diagrammatic construction of language fur- nishes us with an illustration of the graduated rela- tionship of things and of the way in which the human race arrives at its knowledge, its perceptions or oic- tures. We said that philosophy is that endeavor which seeks to throw light on the process of human thought. This work has been rendered very difficult by the un- avoidable misunderstanding of the universal relation- ship just mentioned. The transcendentalists insist above all that the process of thinking and its product, thought, should not be classed among ordinary physics, not as a part of physical nature, but as the creature of another nature which carries the mysteri- ous name of metaphysics. That such a nature and such a science is neither possible nor real is proven by the construction of language which normally describes everything as being closely related and corroborates this by its abnormal shortcomings which we called slips of the tongue. The shortcomings of language which demonstrate the positive outcome of philosophy consist in occasion- SPIRIT AND NATURE 373 ally giving insufficiently significant names to things belonging to a group in which the distinction between individuals, species, genera, and families is not clearly defined. It is not discernible, for instance, whether the term "cat" applies to a domestic cat or to a tiger, because that term is used for a large class of animals of which the domestic cat is the arch-type. But it may be that this illustration is not well chosen for the purpose of demonstrating that slip of the tongue which is supposed to give us an exact ap- preciation of the positive outcome of philosophy. Let us find another and better illustration which will be a transition from the inadequate to the adequate and thus throw so much more light on the obscurities of language. Another and better example of the inadequacies of language is the distinction between fish and meat. In this case, we entirely lack a general term for meat, one kind of which is furnished by aquatic animals and the other by terrestrial animals. Now let the reader apply this shortcoming of lan- guage to the distinction between physics and meta- physics, or between thought and reality. We lack a term which will fully indicate the relation between these two. Thoughts are indeed real things. True, there is a difference whether I have one hundred dol- lars in imagination or in reality in my pocket. Still we must not exaggerate this difference into something transcendental. Painted money or imagined money are in a way also real, that is in imagination. In other words, language lacks a term which will clearly ex- press the different realities within the compass of the unit. 3'A THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OF PHILOSOPHY The understanding- of these peculiarities of lan- guage is calculated to promote the insight and enlight- enment in regard to that secret lamp which man is carrying in his brain and with which he lights up the things of this world. The cultivation of the theory of understanding, the critique of reason, has an elemen- tary significance for the elucidation of all things. This is not saying that philosophy, that special science with which we are here dealing, is a universal science in the sense in which antiquity conceived of it. But it is universal nevertheless in the sense in which the alpha- bet and other primary topics are universal. Every one must use his brains and should therefore take pains to understand its processes. Though the knowl- edge of these does not make other efforts unnecessary, still it explains many ideas, it elucidates the nature of thinking which every one is doing and which is fre- quently used in a more ruthless manner than a dog would treat a rag. The inertia which has prevented the one-sided idealists on the one hand and the one-sided material- ists on the other from coming to a peaceful under- standing may be traced to one of those slips of the tongue. We lack the right terms for designating the relationship between spiritual phenomena, such as our ideas, conceptions, judgments and conclusions and many other things on one side and the tangible, pon- derable, commensurable things on the other. True, the reason for this lack of terms is the absence of un- derstanding, and for this reason the dispute is not one of mere words, although it can be allayed only by an improvement of our terminology. Buchner, in his well-known work on "Force and SPIRIT AND NATURE 375 Matter," likewise overlooks this point, the same as all prior materialists, because they are as onesidedly in- sistent on their matter as the idealist are on their idea. Quarrel and strife mean confusion, only peace will bring light. The contrast between matter and mind finds its conciliation in the positive outcome of phil- osophy which teaches that all distinctions must be reasonable, because neither our instrument of thought nor the rest of nature justify any exaggerated distinc- tions. In order to elucidate the moot question, noth- ing is required but the insight that ideas which nature develops in the human brain are materials for the work of our understanding, though not materials for the work of our hands. Philosophy has made material efforts to grasp the understanding and its conceptions and is still making them in the same way in which chemistry is work- ing for the understanding of substances and physics for the understanding of forces. Substances, forces, ideas, conceptions, judgments, conclusions, knowledge and perceptions, according to the positive outcome of philosophy, must be regarded as differences or varieties of the same monistic genus. The differentiation of things no more contradicts their unity than their unity contradicts their differentiation. Darwin expanded the conception of "species" and thus contributed to a better understanding of zoology. Philosophy expands the conception of species still far beyond the Darwinian definition in teaching us to con- sider the species as little generalities and the largest genus, the absolute or the cosmos as the all in one, the all-embracing species. In order to closely connect the worm and the ele- phant, the lowest and the highest animal, the vegetable 376 THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OF PHILOSOPHY and the animal kingdom, the inorganic and the organic, as members of the same species or genus in a reason- able way, we must keep account of the gradations in nature, the transitions, the connecting links and con- necting ideas. Embryology, which shows that the life of the highest animal develops through the stages of the animal genus, has greatly promoted the under- standing of the common nature of all animals. "The continuity in the natural gradation of things is perfect, because there are no gradations which are not represented, because there are no differences be- tween the various grades which nature does not fill by an intermediary form. . . . There is no abrupt dif- ference in nature, no metaphysical jump, no vacuum, no gap in the order of the world," says a well-known author of our times whose name I shall not mention, because T wish to base my argument on the acknowl- edged facts rather than on names of authorities. What Darwin taught us in relation to animal life, viz., that there are no fundamental differences between species, that is taught by philosophy in regard to the universe. The understanding of the latter is rendered difficult by the habit of making a transcendental dis- tinction between matter and mind. VIII UNDERSTANDING IS MATERIAL Whether we say that philosophy has the under- standing for the object of its study, or whether we UNDERSTANDING IS MATERIAL 377 say that philosophy investigates the method of utiliz- ing subjective understanding in order to arrive at gen- uine, correct, excellent, objective knowledge, that is only a matter of using different terms for the same process. It makes no difference whether we designate the object of our special science as a thing or as a process. It is much more essential to understand that the distinction between the thing and its action is in this instance of little consequence. According to modern natural science all existence is resolved into motion. It is well known now that even rocks do not stand still, but are continuously active, growing and decaying. The understanding, the intellect, is an active object, or an objective action, the same as sunshine, the flow of waters, growing of trees, disintegration of rocks, or any other natural phenomenon. Also the understand- ing, the thinking which takes place consciously or un- consciously in the human brain, is a phenomenon of as indubitable actuality as the most material of them. It cannot in the least shake our contention of the mate- rially perceptible nature of intellectual activity that we become aware of this activity by an internal, not by an external, sense. Whether a stone is externally per- ceptible or thought internally, what difference does this slight distinction make in the incontestable fact that both perceptions are of equal material, natural and sense-perceptible kind? Why should not the action of the brain belong in the same category as the action of the heart? And though the movement of the heart be internal and that of the tongue of the nightingale external, what is to prevent us from con- sidering these two movements from the higher view- 378 THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OF PHILOSOPHY point of natural or material processes? If the func- tion of the heart may be referred to as material, why not the function of the brain? True, the present usages of language are in conflict with this mode of thought. But it must be remembered that every science comes into conflict with usages of language by progressive development. The discovery of every new thing in plant and animal life compels the discoverer to invent a new term or change the meaning of an old one. The term material has not had a well defined, but rather an indefinite meaning so far. Now, since it is necessary, in order to understand the function of the brain to remove it from the class of transcendental or metaphysical conceptions and assign to it a place among the material things, the question arises : What will be the most appropriate term for it? The mate- rial and the spiritual are both two species of the same genus. How are we to designate the species, how the genus ? For the sake of complete clearness, we require three different names, one for each species and a com- mon general name. But since we are much less con- cerned about the name than about the understanding of these facts which cannot be well explained without terms, we do not insist dogmatically on calling the understanding material. It is sufficient to point out that the function of the heart and of the brain both belong to the same class, no matter whether this class be called material, real, physical, or what not. So long as language has not established a definite mean- ing for these terms, all of them serve equally well and are equally deceptive. The positive outcome of philosophy which cul- minates in placing the theory of understanding in the UNDERSTANDING IS MATERIAL 379 same class with all other theories, cannot be easily demonstrated on account of a natural confusion of thought which arises from an equally natural confu- sion of language. In the special department of handi- craft as well as in that of scientific brain work the terminology is well systematized, while in the general affairs of life and science there is a confusion which is as great in the matter of conceptions as in that of applying the terms by which those awkward concep- tions are expressed. Wherever understanding is clear, there the lan- guage is also clear. The man who does not under- stand shoemaking does not understand its termin- ology. This is not saying that the understanding of a trade and the understanding of its terminology are identical, but only indicating their actual connection. If the reader has had a glimpse of the enormity of the work of more than two thousand years of philos- ophy in order to state what little we know today of its achievement in the science of understanding, he will not be very much surprised at the difficulties we here meet with in finding terms for its demonstration. The function of the brain is as material as that of the heart. The heart and its function are two things, but they are dependent one upon the other so that one cannot exist without the other. The function may partly be felt. We feel the heart beating, the brain working. The working of the heart may even be felt by touch, which is not the case with the working of the brain. But it would be a mistake to imagine that our knowledge of the function of the heart is exhausted by our perception of it through the touch. Once we have overcome the habit of making exaggerated distinctions 3S0 THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OF PHILOSOPHY between things, and have learned to consider the dif- ferences of things as well as their interconnection, we can easily understand that the science of the function of the heart is an infinite science which is connected with all others. The heart cannot work without the blood, the blood cannot exist without food, and this is connected with the air, the plants, the animals, the sun, and the moon. The function of the brain and its product, the understanding, is likewise inseparable from the uni- versal interdependence of things. The health of the blood which is produced by the action of the heart is no more and no less a material phenomenon than the total knowledge of science which appears as a product of brain life. Although we represent the doctrine of the material nature of understanding as the positive outcome of philosophy, this is not proclaiming the victory of that narrow materialism which has been spreading itself particularly since the eighteenth century. On the con- trary, this mechanical materialism wholly misunder- stands the nature of the problem. It teaches that the faculty of thought is a function of the brain, the brain is the object of study and its function, the faculty of thought, is fully explained as a brain quality or func- tion. This materialism is enamored of mechanics, idolizes it, does not regard it as a part of the world, but as the sole substance which comprises the whole uni- verse. Because it misunderstands the relation of thing and function, of subject and predicate, it has no ink- ling of the fact that this relation which it handles in such a matter-of-fact way, but not at all scientifically, may be an object worthy of study. The materialist of THE FOUR PRINCIPLES OF LOGIC 381 the old school is too horny-handed to consider the function or quality of understanding as an object worthy of a separate scientific department. We, on the other hand, follow the suggestion of Spinoza, who required of the philosophers that they should consider everything in the light of eternity. In so doing we find that the tangible things, such as the brain, are qualities of nature, and that in the same way the socalled func- tions are natural things, substantial parts of the uni- verse. Not only tangible objects are "things," but also the rays of the sun and the scent of flowers belong to this category, and perceptions are no exception to the rule. But all these "things" are only relative things, since they are qualities of the one and absolute which is the only thing, the "thing itself," well known to every one by the name of the universe, or cosmos. IX THE FOUR PRINCIPLES OF LOGIC Since this work wishes to demonstrate the positive outcome of philosophy, the reader may ask the author what are his proofs that instead of the quintessence of thousands of 3^ears of philosophical work he is not offered the elaboration of any individual philosopher, or even that of the author himself. In reply I wish to say that my work would be ren- dered uselessly voluminous by quotations from the works of the most prominent philosophical writers, THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OF PIIILOSOPII"X without proving" anything-, since the words of one often contradict those of another. What is said by Kant, Fichtc, Schelling, or Hegel, in one place of any of their works, is at least consider- ably modified, if not contradicted, in another place of the same work. It is of little consequence, how and by whose help I have arrived at the positive outcome of philosophy as here rendered. Whether it is the actual outcome or not can be judged only by the expert, and every opinion is necessarily very subjective. Under the circumstances T, as author, claim that my opinion is worth as much as any other, and the reader may therefore accept my assurance. As to the further value of that which I offer, it is a peculiarity of the subject under discussion that every reader car- ries it and its experiences within himself and may, without consulting any other author, at once draw his own conclusions about my views, provided he has acquired the necessary training in thought. What a traveler tells us about the interior of Africa must either be believed to the letter or verified by the accounts of other travelers. But what I say about logic will, I hope, find its corroboration in the logic of every read- ing brain. The theory of understanding which has become the special object of philosophy, is nothing else, and can- not be anything else, but expanded logic. Many prac- tical rules and laws of this department are known and recognized since the time of Aristotle. But the ques- tion whether there is one world or two, a natural and unnatural, or supernatural as it is called with prefer- ence, that is the point which has given much trouble to THE FOUR PRINCIPLES OF LOGIC 8 S3 philosophy and which will influence the health of logic so long as it is undecided. Dr. Friedrich Dittes, director of the institute of pedagogy in Vienna, has published a School of Peda- gogy, several editions of which have appeared, in which he gives much attention to logic. Dittes is a prominent pedagogue, well known through his writ- ings. He confines himself in his School to teaching only that which is well established and accepted with- out a doubt. As a practical man who addresses him- self mainly to teachers of primary grades, he would not place himself on the pinnacle of the outcome of philosophy, even if he could. He must confine himself to that which is well established, which is far removed from the disputes of the day. But it may here serve as a whetstone by the help of which we may give to the positive product of philosophy its latest and great- est sharpness. He writes right in the beginning of the first part: "Our ideas are as manifold as the objects to which they refer. Several things may have many or few, or at least one quality, in common. Still they may also be totally different." This last point, viz., that there may be things which are "totally" different from one another, is the one which is decidedly rejected by that science which has risen to the eminence of the positive acquisition of philosophy. There can be no natural things which are "totally" different from one another, because they must all of them have in common the quality of being natural. It sounds very commonplace to say that there are no unnatural things in nature. Since the last witch 384 THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OP PHILOSOPHY was burnt, everybody is sufficiently enlighten* know that. But the logical conclusions of natural monism have not yet been drawn. True, natural science, properly socalled. is busily engaged in arriving at them. But so much more strife is there in the "science of mind," and there is no other remedy but a well founded theory of understanding which teaches that nature is not alone absolute nature, but also the nature of the absolute. From this doctrine it neces- sarily follows that all things are not individually inde- pendent, but related by sex, dependent children, "predi- cates" of the monistic unity of the world. "The arch fountain of the human spirit," says Dittes, "is perception. . . . Whether perception as such discloses to us the true nature of things, or whether it makes us familiar only with their phe- nomena, this is not to be discussed by logic." The practical pedagogue who confines himself to the edu- cation of children's brains or who wishes at most to influence such teachers as educate children's brains, is quite right in being satisfied with the old traditional Aristotlean logic. But in the school of the human race, this logic has not been sufficient. For this reason the philosophers have broached the question whether perception, "the arch fountain of the human spirit," is a true or a deceptive fountain. The product of the philosophical investigation which we here offer amounts to the declaration that the logicians are greatly mistaken about the "arch fountain." It is a cardinal error of ancient logic to regard perception as the ultimate source from which the human mind dips its knowledge. It is nature which is the ultimate source, and our perception is but the mediator of un- THE FOUR PRINCIPLES OF LOGIC 385 derstanding. And its product, recognized truth, is not truth itself, but merely a formal picture of it. Univer- sal nature is the arch fountain, is the eternal and im- perishable truth itself, and our perception, like every other part of universal existence, is only an attribute, a particle of absolute nature. The human mind, with whose nature logic is dealing, is no more an independ- ent thing than any other, but simply a phenomenon, a reflex or predicate of nature. To confound true perceptions or perceived truths with general truth, with the non plus ultra of all truths, is equivalent to regarding a sparrow as the bird in general, or a period of civilization as civilization itself, which would mean the closing of the door to all further devel- opment. Modern philosophy, beginning with Bacon of Veru- lam and closing with Hegel, carries on a constant strug- gle with the Aristotlean logic. The product of this strug- gle, the outcome of philosophy, does not deny the old rules of traditional logic, but adds a new and decidedly higher circle of logical perception to the former ones. For the sake of better understanding it may be well to give to this circle a special title, the special name of "theory of understanding," which is sometimes called "dialectics." In order to demonstrate the essential contents of this philosophical product by an investigation of the fundamental laws of traditional logic and to explain it thereby, I refer once more to the teacher of elementary logic, Dittes. Under the caption of "Principles of Judgment" he teaches: "Since judging, like all thinking, aims at the perception of truth, the rules have been sought after 386 THE POSITIVE OUTCOME oe philosophy by which this purpose might be accomplished. As univer- sally applicable rules, as principles or laws of thought, the following four have been named: (1) The law of uniformity (identity). i ".' ) The law of contradiction. I The law of the excluded third. ( 1 ) The law of adequate cause. - ' So much scholastic talk has been indulged in over these four "principles," that I can hardly bring myself to discuss them further. But since my purpose, the demon- stration of the positive outcome of philosophy, consists in throwing a new light on the logic contained in these four so-called principles or laws, I am compelled to lay bare their inmost kernel. The first principle, then, declares that A is A, or to speak mathematically, every quantity is equal to itself. In plain English : a thing is what it is ; no thing is what it is not. "Characters which are excluded by any con- ception must not be attributed to it." The square is ex- cluded from the conception of a circle, therefore the pre- dicate "square" must not be given to a circle. For the same reason a straight line must not be crooked, and a lie must not be true. Xow this so-called law of thought may be well enough for household use, where nothing but known quantities are under consideration. A thing is what it is. Right is not left and one hundred is not one thousand. Whoever is named Peter or Paul remains Peter or Paul all his life. This, I say, is all right for household use. But when we consider matters from the wider point of view of cosmic universal life, then this famous law of thought proves to be nothing but an expedient in logic which is not adequate to the nature of things, but merely a means of mutual understanding for us human beings. THE FOUR PRINCIPLES OF LOGIC 387 Hence the left bank of the Rhine is not the right, because we have agreed that in naming the banks of a river we will turn our backs to the source and our faces to the mouth of the river and then designate the banks as right and left. Such a way of distinguishing, thinking, and judging is good and practical, so long as this narrow standpoint is accompanied by the consciousness of its narrowness. Hitherto this has not been the case. This determined logic has overlooked that the perception which is produced by its rules is not truth, not the real world, but only gives an ideal, more or less accurate, re- flection of it. Peter and Paul, who according to the law of identity are the same all their lives, are in fact dif- ferent fellows every minute and every day of their lives, and all things of this world are, like those two, not con- stant, but very variable quantities. The mathematical points, the straight lines, the round circles, are ideals. In reality every point has a certain dimension, every straight line, when seen through a magnifying glass, is full of many crooked turns, and even the roundest circle, according to the mathematicians, consists of an infinite number of straight lines. The traditional logic, then, declares with its law of identity, or in the words of Dittes "law of uniformity," that Peter and Paul are the same fellows from beginning to end, or that the western mountains remain the same western mountains so long as they exist. The product of modern philosophy, on the other hand, declares that the identity of people, woods, and rocks is inseparably linked ..to their opposite, their incessant transformation. The old school logic treats things, the objects of perception, like stereotyped moulds, while the philosophically expanded logic considers such treatment adequate for household 388 THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OF PHILOSOPHY use only. The logical household use of stereotyped con- ceptions extends, and should extend, to all of science. The consideration of things as remaining "the same" is indis- pensable, and yet it is very salubrious to know and re- member that the things are not only the same permanent and stereotyped, but at the same time variable and in flow. That is a contradiction, but not a senseless one. This contradiction has confused the minds and given much trouble to the philosophers. The solution of this problem, the elucidation of this simple fact, is the positive product of philosophy. I have just declared that logic so far did not know that the perception produced by its principles does not offer us truth itself, but only a more or less accurate pic- ture of it. I have furthermore contended that the posi- tive outcome of philosophy has materially added to the clearness of the portrait of the human mind. Logic claims to be "the doctrine of the forms and laws of thought." Dialectics, the product of philosophy, aims to be the same, and its first paragraph declares : Not thought produces truth, but being, of which thought is only that part which is engaged in securing a picture of truth. The fact resulting from this statement may easily confuse the reader, viz., that the philosophy which has been bequeathed to us by logical dialectics, or dialectic logic, must explain not alone thought, but also the original of which thought is a reflex. While, therefore, traditional logic teaches in its first law that all things are equal to themselves, the new dialec- tics teaches not only that things are equal to themselves and identical from start to finish, but also that these same things have the contradictory quality of being the same and yet widely variable. If it is a law of thought THE FOUR PRINCIPLES OF LOGIC 389 that we gain as accurate as possible a conception of things by the help of- thought, it is at the same time a law of thought that all things, processes, and proceedings are not things but resemble the color of that silk which, al- though equal to itself and identical throughout, still plays from one color into another. The things of which the thinking thing or human intellect is one are so far from being one and the same from beginning to end that they are in truth and fact without beginning and end. And as phenomena of nature, as parts of infinite nature, they only seem to have a beginning and end, while they are in reality but natural transformations arising temporarily from the infinite and returning into it after a while. Natural truth or true nature, without beginning and end, is so contradictory that it only expresses itself by shifting phenomena which are nevertheless quite true. To old line logic this contradiction appears senseless. It insists on its first, second, and third law, on its identity, its law of contradiction and excluded third, which must be either straight or crooked, cold or warm, and excludes all intermediary conceptions. And in a way it is right. For every-day use it is all right to deal in this summary fashion with thoughts and words. But it is at the same time judicious to learn from the positive outcome of philosophy that in reality and truth things do not come to pass so ideally. The logical laws think quite cor- rectly of thoughts and their forms and applications. But they do not exhaust thinking and its thoughts. They overlook the consciousness of the inexhaustibleness of all natural creations, of which the object of logic, human understanding, is a part. This object did not fall from heaven, but is a finite part of the infinite which actually has the contradictory quality of possessing in and with 390 THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OF PHILOSOPHY its logical nature that universal nature which is superior to all logic. From this critique of the three first "fundamental laws of logic" it is apparent that the human understand- ing is not only everywhere identical, but also different in each individual and has a historical development. We arc, of course, logically entitled to consider this faculty like all others by itself and give it a birthday. Wherever man begins, there understanding, the faculty of thought, begins. But we are philosophically and dialectically no less entitled, and it is even our duty, to know that the faculty of understanding, the same as its human bearer, has no beginning, in spite of the fact that we ascribe a beginning to them. When we trace the historical devel- opment of these two, of man and understanding, back- ward to their origin, we arrive at a transition to the animal and see their special nature merging into general nature. The same is found in tracing the development of the individual mind. Where does consciousness begin in the child? Before, at, or after birth? Consciousness arises from its opposite, unconsciousness, and returns to it. In consequence we regard the unconscious as the sub- stance and the conscious as its predicate or attribute. And the fixed conceptions which we make for ourselves of the units or phenomena of the natural substance are recog- nized by us as necessary means in explaining nature, but at the same time it is necessary to learn from dialectics that all fixed conceptions are floating in a liquid element. The infinite substance of nature is a very mobile element, in which all fixed things appear and sink, thus being tem- porarily fixed and yet not fixed. Now let us briefly review the fourth fundamental law of logic, according to which everything must have an ade- THE FOUR PRINCIPLES OF LOGIC 391 quale cause. This law is likewise very well worthy of attention, yet it is very inadequate, because the question what should be our conception of the world and what is the constitution of the most highly developed thinking faculty of the world requires the answer: the world, in which everything has its adequate cause, is nevertheless, including consciousness and the faculty of thought, without beginning, end, and cause, that is, a thing justi- fied in itself and by itself. The law of the adequate cause applies only to pictures made by the human mind. In our logical pictures of the world everything must have its adequate cause. But the original, the universal cosmos, has no cause, it is its own cause and effect. To understand that all causes rest on the causeless is an important dia- lectic knowledge which first throws the requisite light on the law of the necessity of an adequate cause. Formally everything must have its cause. But really everything has not only one cause, but innumerable causes. Not alone father and mother are the cause of my existence, but also the grand parents and great grand parents, together with the air they breathed, the food they ate, the earth on which they walked, the sun which warmed the earth, etc. Not a thing, not a process, not a change is the adequate cause of another, but everything is rather caused by the universe which is absolute. When philosophy began its career with the intention of understanding the world, it soon discovered that this purpose could be accomplished only by special study. When it chose understanding, or the faculty of thought, as the special object of its study, it separated its specific object too far from the general existence. Its logic, in opposing thought to the rest of existence, forgot the in- terconnection of the opposites, forgot that thought is a 392 THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OF PHILOSOPHY form, a species, an individuality which belongs to the genus of existence, the same as fish to the genus of meat, night to the genus of day, art to nature, word to action, and death to life. It does not attempt to explore the es- sence of thought for its own sake, but for the purpose of discovering the rules of exploring and thinking correctly. It could not very well arrive at those coveted rules, so long as it idealized truth transcendcntally and elevated it far above the phenomena. All phenomena of nature are true parts of truth. Even error and lies are not op- posed to truth in that exaggerated sense in which the old style logic represents them, which teaches that two con- tradictory predicates must not be simultaneously applied to the same subject, that any one subject is either true or false, and that any third alternative is out of the question. Such statements are due to an entire misconception of truth. Truth is the absolute, universal sum of all exist- ing things, of all phenomena of the past, present, and future. Truth is the real universe from which errors and lies are not excluded. In so far as stray thoughts, giants and brownies, lies and errors are really existing, though only in the imagination of men, to that extent they are true. They belong to the sum of all phenomena, but they are not the whole truth, not the infinite sum. And even the most positive knowledge is nothing but an excellent picture of a certain part. The pictures in our minds have this in common with their originals that they are true. All errors and lies are true errors and true lies, hence are not so far removed from truth that one should belong to heaven and the other to eternal damnation. Let us remain human. Since old line logic with its four principles was too narrowminded, its development had to produce thai dia- UNDERSTANDING ON THE RELIGIOUS FIELD 393 lectics which is the positive outcome of philosophy. This science of thought so expanded regards the universe as the truly universal or infinite, in which all contradictions slumber as in the womb of conciliation. Whether the new logic shall have the same name as the old, or assume the separate title of theory of understanding or dialectics, is simply a question of terms which must be decided by considerations of expediency. X THE FUNCTION OF UNDERSTANDING ON THE RELIGIOUS FIELD We took our departure from the fact that philosophy is searching for "understanding." The first and principal acquisition of philosophy was the perception that its object is not to be found in a transcendental generality. Who- ever wishes to obtain understanding, must confine himself to something special, without, however, through this limi- tation losing sight of all measure and aim to such an ex- tent that he forgets the infinite generality. A modern psyschologist who occupies himself with "Thoughts on Enlightenment," which topic is evidently related to ours, says: "Real and genuine enlightenment can proceed only from religious motives." Expressed in our language, this would mean: Every genuine under- standing, every true conception or knowledge, must be based on tie clear consciousness that the infinite universe is the arch fundament of all things. Understanding and true enlightenment are identical. 394 THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OF PHILOSOPHY "It is true," say the "Thoughts on Enlightenment," "that all enlightenment takes the form of struggles on account of the nature of him who is to be enlightened and of the object about which he is to be informed. But it is a strug- gle for religion, not against it." The author, Professor Lazarus, says in his preface that he does not wish the reader to base his opinion on any single detached sen- tence. "Every single sentence," he says, "may be tested as to its value, but the whole of my views on religion and enlightenment cannot be recognized from any single one of them." As this wish is entirely justified and as our position is somewhat supported by his psychological treatment of enlightenment, we shall comply with his wish and seek to grasp the meaning of his statements on the religious nature of enlightenment in their entirety, not as isolated sentences. We even go a step farther than Professor Lazarus, by extending to understanding what he says about enlighten- ment, viz., that genuine knowledge and enlightenment must, so to say, take their departure from religious mo- tives. But we differ a little as to what motives are relig- ious. Lazarus refers, so far as I can see, to ideas and the ideal, while we, thanks to the positive outcome of philosophy, understand the terms religion and religions to refer to the universal interdependence of things. Obviously the dividing line between heat and cold is drawn by the human mind. The point selected for this purpose is the freezing point of water. One might just as well have selected any other point. Evidently the divid- ing line between that which is religious and that which is irreligious is as indeterminate as that between hot and cold. Neither any university nor any usage of language UNDERSTANDING ON THE RELIGIOUS FIELD 395 can decide that, nor is the pope a scientific authority in the matter. It is mainly due to the socalled historical school that a thing is considered not alone by its present condition, but by its origin and decline. What, then, is religion and religious ? The fetish cult, the animal cult, the cult of the ideal and spiritual creator, or the cult of the real human mind ? Where are we to begin and where to end ? If the ancient Germans regarded the great oak as sacred and religious, why should not art and science become religious among the modern Germans? In this sense, Lazarus is correct. The "enlightenment" which was headed in France by Voltaire and the encyclopedists, in Germany by Lessing and Kant, the "enlightenment" which came as a struggle for reason and against religion, was then in fact a struggle for religion, not against it. By this means one may make everything out of anything. But this has to be learned first in order to recognize how our mind ought to be adjusted, so that it may perceive that not only everything is everything, but that each thing also has its own place. We wish to become clear in our minds how it is possi- ble, and reconcilable with sound conception, that such an anti-religious struggle as that carried on during that period of "enlightenment" can nevertheless be a struggle for and in the interest of religion. We wish to find out how one may abolish religion and at the same time main- tain it. This is easily understood, if we remember the repeat- edly quoted dialectic rule according to which our under- standing must never exaggerate the distinctions between two things. We must not too widely separate the relig- ious from the secular field. Of course, the religious field 396 THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OF PHILOSOPHY is in heaven, while the secular is naturally in the profane universe. Having become aware that even religious im- agination, together with its heaven and spirit creator, are profane conceptions in spite of their alleged transcenden- talism, we find religion in the secular field, and thus this field has in a way become religious. The religious and the profane infinite have something in common, at least this that the indefinite religious name may also be ap- plied to the secular or profane infinity. "All culture, every condition of humanity or of a nation, has its roots as well as its bounds in history," says our Professor of psychology. Should not religion, which according to the words of a German emperor "must be preserved for the people," also have its bounds in history? Or does it belong to the infinite and must it exist forever? In order to free history of its bounds, it is necessary to avail ourselves of the positive outcome of philosophy and to demonstrate that nothing is infinite but the infinite itself, which has the double nature of being infinite and inseparable from the finite phenomena of nature. The whole of nature is eternal, but none of its individual phe- nomena is, although even the imperishable whole is com- posed of perishable parts. The relation of the constant whole of nature to its variable parts, the relation of the general to the specialties composing it, includes, if we fully grasp it, a perfect con- ception of the human mind as well as of the understand- ing and enlightenment which it acquires. This mind can- not enlighten itself as to its special nature without observ- ing how it came to enlighten itself as to the nature of other specialties. We then find that it has likewise enlightened itself on religious phenomena by recognizing them as a part, as a variation, of the general phenomenon of the con- UNDERSTANDING ON THE RELIGIOUS FIELD 397 stant, eternal, natural universe. Hence secular nature, which is at the same time eternal and temporal, is the mother of religious nature. Of course, the child partakes of the nature of the mother. Religion, historically con- sidered, arises from nature, but the determination of the date of the beginning of this specialty is left as much to the choice of man as that of the point where the cold and the warm meet. The general movement of nature, from which arise its specialties, proceeds in infinite time. Its transformations are so gradual that every determined point constitutes an arbitrary act which is at the same time arbitrary and necessary ; necessary for the human being who wishes to gain a conception of it. A perfect concep- tion of religion, therefore, goes right to the center of the question, to the point where the religious specialty reaches a characteristic stage, to its freezing point, so to say. From this standpoint, heat and cold may be sharply de- fined ; likewise religion. If we say, for instance, that re- ligion is the conception of a supernatural spirit who rules nature, and the reader thinks this definition somewhat appropriate, the simple demonstration of the achievements of philosophy in the field of understanding or dialectics proves that this religious conception is untenable in this world of the human mind which knows how to obtain a logical picture of its experiences. To desire to preserve religion for the people as a sharply defined and finite thing is contrary to all logic and equivalent to swimming against the tide. On the other hand, it is equally illogical to identify religion after the manner of Lazarus with the conception of natural infinity or infinite nature, because that promotes mental haziness. The laws of thought obtained by philosophical research give us considerable enlightenment about the infinite 398 THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OF PHILOSOPHY material process, the nature of which is sublime enough to be worthy of religious devotion, and yet special and mat- ter-of-fact enough to wash the dim eyes with natural clearness. We have already seen in preceding chapters that we must first define our standpoint before we can decide which is the right or left bank of a river. So it is also in the matter of abolishing and maintaining religion for the people. It can be done the moment we extend the dis- cussion to the realm of infinity. The conception of in- finity, called substance by Spinoza, monad by Leibniz, thing itself by Kant, the absolute by Hegel, is indeed necessary in order to explain anything, not only by the fourth root, but by the infinite root of the adequate rea- son. To that extent we are agreed that enlightenment, or understanding as we say, is not alone a struggle against religion, but also for it. In the theory of understanding acquired by philosophy, there is contained a decisive re- peal of religion. Nevertheless we say with Lazarus: "The power of enlightenment and its aim are not expressed in negation, not in that which is not believed, but in that which is believed, venerated, and preserved." And yet every enlightening perception, every understanding result- ing from enlightenment, is a negation. In seeking enlight- enment, for instance, on understanding, it is necessary, in order to prove that it is a natural phenomenon, to deny the religious element in so far as it assumes the existence of a divine chief spirit whose secondary copy the human spirit is supposed to be. Or, in order to gain enlighten- ment on the nature of the universe, in order to realize that it is a truly universal universe, we are compelled to deny the existence of every "higher" world, including the re- ligious. But if we desire to become enlightened as to UNDERSTANDING ON THE RELIGIOUS FIELD 399 how it is that religion may not alone be denied, but also preserved, we must transfer its origin from an illogical other world into the natural and logical universe. Thus religion becomes natural and nature religious. If worship is confined to the idolization of the sun or the cat, every one realizes the temporality of the matter. And if we restrict worship to the adoration of the great omnipotent spirit, every one realizes the temporality of this adoration who has acquired an accurate conception of the small human spirit If, on the other hand, we extend religious worship to everything which has ever been ven- erated, or will ever be venerated, by human beings, in other words, if we extend the conception of religion to the entire universe, then it assumes a very far-reaching significance. This is the essence of enlightenment on religion : That we may at will expand or contract our conceptions, that all things are alike to the extent of representing only one nature, that all fantastical ideas, all good and evil spirits and ghosts, no matter how "supernaturally" conceived, are all natural. The essential thing in the enlightenment acquired by philosophical study is the appreciation of the fact that understanding, enlightenment, science, etc., are not culti- vated for their own sake, but must serve the purpose of human development, the material interests of which de- mand a correct mental picture of the natural processes. We have chosen the religious idea for discussion in this chapter so that it may serve as a means of illustrating the nature of thought in general. We regard it as the merit of philosophy to have unveiled this nature. Professor Lazarus is quite a pleasing companion. He is a fine thinker, saturated with the teachings of the phil- 1(>e amazed, oh world ! How is understanding possible ? In the first place., there is nothing to be amazed at. Why is not the "naturalistic" philosopher consistent by recognizing his special object, understanding, as a natural object? The "'supposition" that an understanding of things is possible, is neither a supposition nor anything "dogmatic." The philosophers should abandon their old hobby of trying to prove anything by syllogisms. Nowadays, a case is not substantiated by words, but by facts, by deeds. The sciences are sufficiently equipped, and thus the "possibility of understanding" is demonstrated beyond a doubt. "But," say the critics who are so wise that they hear the grass growing, "are those perceptions which are pro- duced by the exact sciences really perceptions? Are they not simply substitutes? Those sciences recognize only the phenomena of things ; but where is the understanding which perceives the truth?" We shall offer it to them. You are naturalists. Well, then, nature is the truth. Or are you spiritualists who make a metaphysical distinction between the truth and the phenomenon ? To understand means to distinguish and judge. The semblance must be distinguished from the truth, but not in an excessive manner. It must be re- membered that even the most evil semblance is a natural phenomenon, and the sublimest truth is only revealed by phenomena, just because it is natural. But the old logic cannot stand any contradictions. Semblance and truth are contradictions for it and they cannot be reconciled by it. But the irreconcilable simply PROGRESS TOWARD CLEAR UNDERSTANDING 421 consists in entertaining, in this monistic world, thoughts which are supposed to be totally different. Hence old style logic lacks entirely the mediating manner of thought which does not elevate understanding and its faculty of thought to the skies, but is satisfied to regard it as a very valuable, but still natural, quality. The old logic could not construct any valid rules of thought, because it thought too transcendentally of think- ing itself. It was not satisfied that thought is only a faculty, a mode of doing, a part of true nature, but the nature of truth was spiritualized by it into a transcen- dental being. Instead of grasping the conception of spirit with blood and flesh, it tries to dissolve blood and flesh into ideas. That would be well enough, if such a solution of the riddles were meant to have no other significance than that of symbols. The old logic contains long chapters about the proofs of truth. It is supposed to be "identical" with the idea and to be proven by ideas. This would be all right, if we remained conscious of the secondary relation in which the idea and understanding stand to truth. But old line logic is not conscious of this relation. On the contrary. Its consciousness distorts that relation. It elevates the mind to the first place and relegates blood and flesh to the last. 'The necessity of a conception is proven by the impos- sibility of its opposite. An idea is contradicted by proving its impossibility. This impossibility is demonstrated when it can be proven that a thing is at the same time A and not-A, or when it can be shown that a thing is neither A nor not-A. The first mode of proof is called antinomy, the second, dilemma." In this representation of the. logical proof much is said of the "thing," for instance this: A thing cannot be at 432 THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OF PHILOSOPHY the same time straight and crooked, true and untrue, light and dark. The excellence of this doctrine is easily appar- ent, because it is overlooked that the concept "thing" is not a fixed, but a variable one. If a straight line is a thing, and a crooked line another thing, and if these two things are held to be opposed to one another, then the above logic is the most justified in the world. But who claims that there are not many straight lines which are crooked at one end, which run straight on for a certain distance and then turn? Who will define to us what a line is ? A line may be composed of 10, 20, 30, etc., parts, and each part is a line. Before anything to the point can be said about the logical laws, it is necessary to say above all how it stands with the relation of the whole to its parts, of the universe to its subdivisions. The old theological question of God and his creatures, the old metaphysical question of the unity and the multiplicity, of truth and its phenomena, reason and consequence, etc., in one word, the question of metaphysical categories must be solved and settled before the definition of the minor factors of understanding, the questions of formal logic, can be attempted. What is a "thing?" A clergyman would answer: Only God is something, everything else is nothing! And we say: Only the universe is something, and everything in it consists of vacillating, changing, precarious, vari- colored, fluid, variable phenomena or relativities. In our times, up to which the theologians have specu- lated so much and contributed so little to understanding, one can hardly touch on the God concept without annoy- ing the reader. Yet it is very essential for a thorough understanding of the human mind to point out that the God concept and the universe concept are analogous con- PROGRESS TOWARD CLEAR UNDERSTANDING 423 cepts. Not in vain have the first minds of modern philos- ophy, such as Cartesius, Spinoza, Leibniz, occupied them- selves so closely with the God concept. They invented the socalled ontological proof of the existence of God. This proof if applied to the universe, testifies to its divinity. A metaphysical cloud pusher as well as the physical cosmos are fundamentally concepts of the most perfect being. It makes little difference whether we say that the concept of the universe, or of the cosmos, or of the most perfect being is innate in man. If this concept were not existing, it would lack the main thing required for its perfection. Hence the most perfect being must exist. And it does. It is the universe, and everything belongs to its existence. Nothing is excluded from it, least of all understanding. The latter is, therfore, not only possible, but a fact, which is proven by the very concept of the most perfect being. This ought to be sufficient to help us over the doubts of the critics, especially over Kantian criticism, or rather dualism. Kant did not care to accept the dogma of the possibility of understanding without examination; he wished to investigate first. He then discovered that we may understand correctly, provided we remain with our understanding on the field of common experience; in other words, in the physical universe, and refrain from digressing into the metaphysical heaven. But he did not understand that the metaphysical heaven against which he warns us would be an obsolete standpoint in our days. He still permits that transcendental possibility to re- main and while he warns us not to stray into it with our understanding he omits to tell us to also keep away from it with our intuition. Kant struggles about between the "thing as phenomenon" and the "thing itself." The former is material and may be understood, the latter is 4:24 THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OF PHILOSOPHY supernatural and may be believed or divined. With this doctrine, he again made understanding, the object of mod- ern philosophy., problematical, thus inviting us to investi- gate further. This we have done, and it is now the positive outcome of philosophy to know clearly and definitely and under- stand that understanding is not only a part of this world of phenomena, but a true part of the general truth, beside which there is no other truth, and which is the most per- fect being. Philosophy took its departure from confused wrang- ling about that which is and that which is not, especially from the religious disappointments met by the Greek nation when its world of deities dissolved into phantasms. Humanity demands a positive, strong, unequivocal, relia- ble understanding. Now, in this world of ours, the solid is so mixed with the fluid, the imperishable with the per- ishable, that a total separation is impossible. Neverthe- less our intellect catches itself continually making separa- tions and distinctions. Should not that appear mysterious to it? The necessary and natural result was the problem of the theory of understanding, the special question of philosophy : Which is the way to an indubitably clear and positive understanding? The summit of Grecian philosophy bears the name of Aristotle. He was a practical man who did not like to stray into the distance when he could find good things near by, and he did not concern himself about the descent of understanding. Its platonic origin from an ideal world went instinctively against his grain. He, therefore, took hold of the question at the nearest end and analyzed the positive knowledge available at that time. But since Grecian science and the knowledge of Aristotlean times PROGRESS TOWARD CLEAR UNDERSTANDING 425 were' rather slim, his attempt to demonstrate logic did not produce any decisive results. But it had been discovered that it was possible to make positive deductions from fixed premises. Aristotle clung to this. He showed clearly and defi- nitely, excellently and substantially, how logical deduc- tions should be made in order to arrive at positive under- standing. All dogs are watchful. My pug-dog is a dog, therefore it is watchful. What can be more evident? Why, then, speculate about God, freedom, and immor- tality, when indubitable knowledge may be obtained by the formal method of exact deductions ? But Aristotle had overlooked something, or, being a practical man, perhaps overlooked it intentionally. The premise from which he deducted the watchfulness of dogs in general, was handed down by tradition and had been accepted on faith. But was it founded on fact? Could there not be some dogs who lacked the quality of watch- fulness, and might not our pug-dog be very unreliable, in spite of all exact deductions ? In the case of the pug-dog this would not be of very great moment. But what about the question of the beginning and end of the world, or the question of the existence of God ? The Grecian gods had been outgrown by Aristotle. The history of logic, and of philosophy in general, is interrupted by Christianity and by the decline of the antique world, until the reformation opens a new era. The Catholic church had^ in its own way, thoroughly set- tled the great questions of the true nature of things, of beginning and end, reason and consequence. But when it, and with it Christianity, began to disintegrate, disbelief once more posed in the brains of the philosophers the old question : How do we obtain reliable and true understand- •126 THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OF PHILOSOPHY ing ? Reliability and truth were at that time still identical. Bacon and Descartes are the men who started the in- vestigation. Both of them were disgusted with Aristotle and with his formal logic, particularly with the subtleties of scholasticism. It did not satisfy this new epoch to found positive understanding on traditional contentions and exact deductions therefrom. It is a radical epoch and, therefore, epoch-making. The new philosophers have the aim of unequivocal understanding in common with the ancient philosophers. Bacon still connects him- self with the stock in trade of the past. His historian says of him that one should not reiterate that Bacon took his departure from experience, for this means nothing or nothing more than that Columbus was a mariner while the main thing is that he discovered America. . . . He wanted to find a new logic corresponding to the new life. . . . The inventive human mind has created the new time, the compass, the powder, the art of typography. . . He wanted a new logic which corresponded to the spirit of invention. He, the philosopher of invention, was Lord Chancellor of England, was a man of the world. Not only himself, but also his science, was too ambitious, too full of energy, too world-embracing, for him to bury himself in solitude. That is a glory for a philosopher, but at the same time an obstacle for his special task, for the new logic. He recognized the import of his task only in its general outlines. But his contemporary and suc- cessor Descartes approached the matter more radically and pointedly. Although in recent times the human mind had demon- strated its positive faculty of understanding in natural sciences, especially by inventions, still it was prejudiced by religious improbabilities in its great premises dealing PROGRESS TOWARD CLEAR UNDERSTANDING 427 with the essence of things and men, with the "good, true, and beautiful," as the ancients called it. In order to end his doubts, Descartes elevates radical doubt to the posi- tion of a principle and of a starting point for all under- standing. Then he cannot doubt that he is at least search- ing for truth. He who does not believe in any under- standing, any science, any inventions, cannot doubt at all events that the impulse for understanding is there. It, at least, is undeniable. Cogito, ergo sum — I think, therefore I am — that is a premise which cannot be shaken. The rest, thinks Descartes, may be deducted by Aristotlean methods. With this thought, the philosopher of modern times relapsed into the old error that anything positively true could be ascertained with logical formulas. His con- sciousness of the thoughts stirring in his brain, I might say his flesh and blood, convinced him by matter-of-fact evidence of the reality of their existence. This fact had hitherto been misunderstood. It is claimed that Descartes could convince himself only of the existence of his soul, of his thought, by evidence. No, my feeling, my sight, my hearing, etc., are just as evident to me as my thinking, and simultaneously with sight and hearing that which is heard and seen. The separation of subject and object can and must be merely a formality. The Descartian thesis has been distorted into the state- ment that nothing is evident to man but his own sub- jective conception. And the ideology has been carried to the extreme of calling the whole world an idea, a phantas- magoria. True, Descartes needed God in order to be sure that his conceptions did not cheat him. In order to prove that we no longer need such extrav- agant means in our times, I shall devote another chapter to this subject. 428 THE POSITIVE OUTCOME Of .PHILOSOPHY XIV CONTINUATION OF THE DISCUSSION ON THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN DOUBTFUL AND EVIDENT UNDERSTANDING Let us divide the history of civilization into two periods. In the first, the less civilized period, the doubt- ful perceptions predominate, in the second period the evident ones. ( >ur special investigation of the correct way of evident understanding began in the first period in which the doubtful perceptions, commonly called errors, predominated. In this period, the gods rule in heaven and imagination on earth. To get rid of errors meant originally to lose gods and heaven. The ideal world was the cause of metaphysics. Metaphysics which drew the investigation of the super- natural into the circle of its activity, did so for the pur- pose of enlightening the human mind. Thus its problem was from the outset of a twofold nature. It desires to throw light on the natural process of thought, which was temporarily unbalanced by a bent for the supernatural, and for this reason it first loses itself in the clouds. While human reason has now become soberer, the meaning of the term "metaphysics" has also been sobered down. Our contemporaneous metaphysicians speak no longer of such transcendental things as the ancients did. Present day metaphysics occupies itself with such abstract ideas as the thing and nothing, being and coming into be- ing, matter and force, truth and error. Particularly the investigation of doubtful, erroneous, and evident or true understanding, which we here discuss, is a part of metaphysics. The term metaphysics, then, has a double meaning, DOUBTFUL AND EVIDENT UNDERSTANDING 429 one of them transcendental and extravagant, the other natural and within sober limits. Our sober task of dem- onstrating the positive outcome of philosophy that acquired sober methods in dealing with understanding also compels us to face transcendental metaphysics, which sobers down in the course of time and develops into its opposite, into pure, bare, naked physics. The divine has become human, the transcendental sober, and so understanding grows ever more unequivo- cal and evident in the progress of history. In order to become clear on the problem of under- standing, we must cease to turn our eyes to any one indi- vidual opinion, thought, knowledge, or perception. We must rather consider the process of understanding in its entirety. We then notice the development from doubt to evidence, from errors to true understanding. At the same time we become aware how unwise it was to entertain such an exaggerated idea of the contrast between truth and error. Whoever searches for true and evident understanding will not find it in Jerusalem, nor in Jericho, nor in the spirit ; not in any single thing," but in the universe. There the known emerges from the unknown so gradually that no beginning can be traced. Understanding comes into being and grows, is partly erroneous and partly accurate, becomes more and more evident. But there is never an absolutely true understanding any more than there can be an absolutely faulty one. Only the universe, but not any single thing, is absolute, imperishable, and impregnable. In order to accurately define understanding, we must separate it from misunderstanding, but not too far, not excessively, otherwise the thing becomes extravagant, The limited formal logic teaches, indeed, that the same 430 THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OF PHILOSOPHY thing cannot be affirmed and denied at the same time, affirmation and denial being contradictions. But such a logic is very narrow. Herbs are not weeds. Weeds are the negation of herbs, and still weeds are herbs. An erroneous understanding is a negation of a true under- standing, error is not truth, and still it exists in truth. There is no absolute error any more than perceptions are the truth itself. All perceptions are and remain nothing but symbols or reflections of truth. We do not wish to confound error with truth and make a stew of them, but rather understand them both. The mixing is done by the man who opposes them as irre- concilable contradictions. Let us first note the mistake committed in so doing. By so opposing error and truth something is done which is not intended, not known. The intention is to confront the erroneous understanding with truth. For this purpose, error is assumed to be the same as erroneous understanding, which may be admitted ; but true understanding and truth are two different things and must be kept separate, if we wish to arrive at clear and unmistakable results. If we formulate the question in this way : How do erroneous and true understanding differ, we are nearer to the desired clarity by two solar distances. We then find that error and understanding do not exclude one another, but are two species of the same genus, two individuals of the same family. Two times two is not alone four ; this is only a part of the truth ; it is also four times one, or eight times one- half, or one plus three, or sixteen times one-quarter, etc. The man who first observed that the sun circled around the earth once a day, committed a mistake, yet he made a true perception. The apparent circulation of the sun in twenty-four hours around the earth is a substantial part DOUBTFUL AND EVIDENT UNDERSTANDING 431 of the understanding which illumines the relation of the motion of the sun and of the earth. No truth is merely simple, but it is at the same time composed of an infinite number of partial truths. The semblance must not be contradictorily separated from truth, in an extravagant sense, but is part of truth, just as all errors contribute toward true understanding. In so far as all perceptions are limited, they are errors, partial truths. True under- standing requires above all the backing of the conscious recognition that it is a limited part of the unlimited uni- verse. The cosmic relation of the whole to its parts, of the general to the special, must be considered in order to get a clear conception of the nature of the human understand- ing. Understanding or knowledge, thinking, perceiving, reasoning, must, for the purpose of investigation, not be excessively separated from other phenomena. In a way, every object which is chosen for special study is isolated. In saying, "in a way," I mean that the separation of the objects of study from other world objects must be con- sciously moderate, not exaggerated. The separation of the intellect from other objects or subjects when investi- gating them, must be accompanied by the recognition that such a separation is not excessive, but only formal. In separating a board, for the purpose of studying its con- dition, from other boards or things and finding that it is black, I must still remember that this board is black only on account of its interdependence with the whole world process ; that the blackness which it possesses is not of its own making, but that light, and eyes, and the whole cosmic connection belong to it. In this way every special perception becomes a proportionate part in the chain of L32 THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OF PHILOSOPHY universal perceptions, and this again a proportionate part of the universal life. That this evident universal life is not a mere sem- blance, not a ghost, not a baseless imagination, but the truth, is made evident to the thinking man by his con- sciousness, reason, common sense. True, he has been de- ceived by them, sometimes. But it requires no logic, no syllogistic proof, to know that they are telling the truth in this respect. It is nevertheless important to give this proof, because by it the peculiar nature of our intellect is revealed, of the object the study of which is the special concern of phil- osophy. This proof, that the universe is the universal truth, was first attempted by philosophy in an indirect way, by casting about in vain for a metaphysical truth. The philosopher Kant was no doubt the thinker who confined the use of understanding most strictly to the domain of experience. Now, if we recognize that this field is universal, we become aware that the assumed Kan- tian limitation is not a limitation at all. The human mind is a universal instrument, the special productions of which all belong to general truth. Though we make a distinc- tion between the doubtful and the positive, the outcome of philosophy teaches us that it must be no excessive distinc- tion, but must be backed up by the consciousness that all evidence is composed of probabilities, of phenomena of truth, of parts of truth. The thinking understanding — this is the result of phil- osophy — is no more evident than anything else and de- rives its existence not from itself, but from the universal life. This universal life from which thought derives its perceptions, from which understanding derives its enlight- DOUBTFUL AND EVIDENT UNDERSTANDING 433 enment, does not only exist as a general thing, but also in the form of infinitely varied individualities. And gen- eralization, the relation of things, their number and ex- tension, are no more, and no less, infinite than individual- ization and specialization. Every tree in the forest, every grain of a pile of sand, are individual, separate, distinct. Every particle of every grain of sand is distinctly individ- ual. And the infinite individualization of nature goes so far that, just as the human individual is different every day, every hour, every moment, so is the individual grain of sand, even though its transformations were not to be- come noticeable until after thousands of years, by accum- ulated changes. By classifying this contradictory, in- finitely general and infinitely individual nature in groups according to time and space, in classes, genera, families, species, orders, and other subdivisions, we are discerning and understanding. In the universe, every group is an individual and every individual is a group. The uniformity of nature is not greater than its variety. Both of them are infinite. We distinguish between time and space. Every moment is composed of little moments. The smallest division of time cannot be denominated any more than the largest, just because there is no smallest and no largest in the uni- verse, neither in time nor in space. Atoms are groups. As smallest parts they exist only in our thoughts and thus give excellent service in chemistry. The consciousness that they are not tangible, but only mental things, does not detract from their usefulness, but heightens it still more. It is the nature of human intelligence to divide, classify, group. We divide the world into four cardinal points ; we also divide it into two kingdoms, the kingdom 434 THE POSITIVE OUTCOME of philosophy of the mind and the kingdom of nature ; the latter we again subdivide into the organic and the inorganic, or perhaps into the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms. In short, science seeks to illumine the universe by division. The question then arises: Which is the genuine and true division ? Where does the variety of science, its undecided vaccillation end, and when does understanding become stable? The reader should remember that the things, the objects of understanding, are not fixed, but also variable objects, and that the whole universe is moving, progress- ing; that especially the human mind becomes more and more affluent from century to century, from year to year, and that for this reason science is not alone compelled to fix things, but also to remain in flow. The fixed and the fluid are not so widely separated in science any more, that the evidence could not be evident and yet at the same time a little doubtful. Man and his understanding are progressive, and for this reason he must progress by experience in his classifi- cations, conceptions, and sciences. The fixed, impregnable, socalled apodictical facts are nothing but tautologies, if seen at close range. After it has become common usage to call only heavy and tangi- ble things bodies, it is an apodictical fact that all bodies are heavy and tangible. If the conceptions of vapor, water and ice are restricted by common usage and by science to the three stages of aggregation of the same substance, then we need not wonder at our firm assur- ance that the water will always remain fluid in all time to come, also above the "stars. =This signifies nothing' more than that we conceive of the things as solid which we call solid, and of those jas. fluid which we call fluid, DOUBTFUL AND EVIDENT UNDERSTANDING 435 but it does not cnange the fact that our faculty of under- standing or perceiving gives us only an approximate pic- ture of natural processes, in which the solid and the fluid are neither wholly opposed nor different, but where the positive and the negative gradually flow into one an- other. The philosophers produced a very good conception of understanding by developing the concept of truth step by step and finally coming to quite exact results. But this "quite exact" must only be accepted in a reason- able sense, not in an extravagant one. Truth as the in- finite, as the sum total of all things and qualities, is "in itself" quite right, but it cannot be accurately reproduced, not even by means of the mind, of reason, or understand- ing. The means is smaller than the purpose, is subordi- nate to purpose. So is our faculty of understanding only a subordinate servant of truth, of the universe. The lat- ter is absolutely evident, true, indubitable, and positive. It does not vitiate the sublimity of this world in the least that it is veiled by appearances, by error, by untruth. On the contrary. Without sin there is no virtue, and without error there is no understanding, no truth. The negative, the weakness, the sin and error, are overcome, and thereby truth shines in full splendor. The universe, the general truth, is a progressive thing. It is absolute, but not at any fixed time or place, but only in the com- bined unity of all time and space. It is sometimes said that this is too much for our in- tellect, that we cannot understand this. It is true that we cannot squeeze this into any of our categories, of our fundamental conceptions, unless we place the category of illimited and indeterminable and infinite truth at the be- ginning of them. If that is not quite clear and plain, it 43G THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OE PHILOSOPHY should serve to teach us that the category of clear and plain human understanding is destined to recognize its function as a subordinate factor of nature. Such an understanding of understanding, isuch a higher consciousness standing ever behind us, promotes a meek pride or a proud meekness which is well distin- guished from the mental poverty of theologians, from the transcendental distinction between God and the world, between creator and creature. To us the perish- able soul is not a narrow-minded servant for whom the plans of the imperishable monster soul are incomprehen- sible. A philosophically educated and self-understanding mind is a part of absolute nature. This mind is not only a limited human mind, but the mind of the infinite eter- nal, omnipotent universe from which it derived the faculty of knowing everything knowable. But when this mind demands the ability to absolutely know everything, it demands that knowledge should be everything, it be- comes transcendental and insolent, it misconceives the relation of science to infinity. The latter is more than science, it is the object of science. XV CONCLUSION The philosopher Herbart declares: "If the meaning of a word were determined by the use to which it is put by this or that person, then the term metaphysics would be ambiguous and scarcely comprehensible. If one wishes to know what meaning of this term has been CONCLUSION 437 handed down to us by tradition, he should read the ancient metaphysicians and their followers, from Aris- totle to Wolff and his school. It will then be found that the concepts of being, of its quality, of cause and effect, of space and time, have been the objects of this science everywhere . . . that it has been attempted to analyze them logically and that this has led to all sorts of dis- putes. These disputes . . . determined the concept of metaphysics." Such a declaration is right enough to furnish, by the help of a little criticism on our part, a sketch of the positive outcome of philosophy. Metaphysics has always been the principal part of philosophy. In the first sentence of his "Handbook for the Elements of Philosophy," Herbart defines philosophy as the "analysis of ideas." According to this, meta- physics would have to analyze the special ideas of being, etc. Now it must be remembered that the idea of being is not so much a special concept as the general idea which comprises all ideas and all things. Everything belongs to being, and to understand that is too much for meta- physics. Hence it came into difficulties. Now our authority has just explained to us that the concept ot metaphysics was not so much determined by the work it accomplished as by disputes. It did not work, but only made the logical attempt to analyze the concept of being. In so doing it led to disputes and did not distinguish itself very much as a science. The latter, Kant has told us in his preface to his "Critique of Pure Reason," is recog- nized by its agreements, not by its disputes. The metaphysical disputes were overcome by philo- sophic science, which is the study of ideas or understand- ing, by arriving at a clear and plain theory of under- 438 THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OF PHILOSOPHY standing, the demonstration of which I have here at- tempted. The faculty of understanding had been transmitted to us by our superstitious ancestors as a thing of another world. But the illusion of another world is a metaphysi- cal one and led to disputes about the idea of being. The positive outcome of philosophy assures us and demonstrates that there is only one world, that this world is the essence of all being, that there are many modes of being, but that they all belong to the same common nature. Thus philosophy has unified the concept of being and overcome metaphysics and its disputes. Universal being has only one quality, the natural one of general existence. At the same time this quality is the essence of all special qualities. Just as the concept of herbs includes all herbs, even weeds, so the concept of being comprises not only that which is, but also that which is not. which was once upon a time and which will be in the future. To free the concept of being from its metaphysical disputes, is a very difficult thing for those who attribute an extravagant meaning to the first principle of logic which says : "Any subject can have only one of two radically different predicates, because it cannot be at the same time A and not-A." All previous science of understanding has really re- volved around this statement. It is based on something plausible, but still more on misunderstanding. Only when w r e have become aware of what has finally been the outcome of the science of understanding, only when this statement is backed up by the positive product of philoso- phy, does this stubbornly maintained and much contested statement receive a lasting value by its just modification. CONCLUSION 439 In the first place, a "subject" is not a fixed, but a variable concept. In the last analysis, as we have suf- ficiently explained in this work, there is only one sole universal subject which is nowhere radically different. The first principle of the old and tried Aristotlean logic tells us that a man, a subject, who is lame cannot move about with alacrity. But I have a friend who was totally lame and who today jumps about briskly ; there is no contradiction in this. But if I tell another man about my lame friend and in the course of my story have this lame subject all of a sudden jumping over chairs and tables, then such a thing is inconceivable and I contradict myself. Such a contradiction is a violation of all logic, but not because agility and lameness are totally different predicates which cannot be attributed to the same sub- ject, nor because the contradiction cannot exist. Being is full of contradictions, but they are not simultaneous or without mediation. A logical speech or story must not forget to mediate. By mediation, all contradictions are solved. And this is the outcome of philosophy. In discordant metaphysics, being and not being are irreconcilable and mutually exclusive contradictions. Metaphysics is in doubt whether this common existence is real or only apparent, or whether there is not some- where in a heaven above the clouds an entirely different life. But philosophy is now fully aware that even the most fictitious being is so positively real that any nega- tion which appearances may attribute to it is outclassed by affirmation to the utter discomfiture of the former. Being and its affirmation is absolute, negation and not being are only relative. Being is everywhere and always dominant, so that there is no non-existence. Though we may say that this or that is nothing, yet we must remain 440 THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OF PHILOSOPHY conscious that anything we may call nothing is still something very positive. There cannot be any ignorance which does not at least know a little. There is no evil which cannot be transformed into good. The things that have been, will be, and are, all of them are. There is no non-existence. It is at least a word, though it does not convey any meaning. The world and our language are of so positive a character that even a meaningless word still means something. Nothing cannot be ex- pressed. The superstition of another "true" world which floats above this world of phenomena or is secretly hidden behind it has so vitiated logic that it is now difficult to remove the discordant metaphysical "concept of being" from the human mind. The belief in something abso- lutely different will not easily disappear. It is especially difficult to demonstrate that conceived things are of the same nature as real things, that both of them really be- long to true nature. Conceived things are pictures, real pictures, pictures of reality. All the limbs of an imaginary dragon are copied from nature. Such creations of imagination are distinguished from truths only by their fanciful composi- tion. To connect nature and human life according to the given order, that is the whole function of understanding. Knowing, thinking, understanding, explaining, has not, and cannot have, any other function but that of describ- ing the processes of experience by division or classifica- tion. The famous scientist Haeckel may call this con- temptuously "museum zoology" and "herbarium bot- any." but he simply shows that he has not grasped the secret of the intellect, but still wonders at it in a meta- physical way, the same as his predecessors. „ _— -~-'"~ CONCLUSION 441 What Darwin ascertained about the "origin of spe- cies" and about the transitions and evolutions in organic life is a very valuable expansion of museum zoology. Whoever expects anything else from the nature of intel- lectual faculties, shows that he is not familiar with the outcome of philosophy, that he has not emancipated him- self from the vain wondering and its accompanying edifi- cation, which the wonder of human intelligence caused to primitive ignorance. Understanding has hitherto been in error about itself and was, therefore, inadequately equipped for the task of giving a true account of its relatives, of the phenomena of nature and life. Nevertheless it has acquired training in the course of culture and has progressively accom- plished better things. Its errors have never been value- less, and its truths will never be sufficient. That this is so, is not due to the defective condition of our intelligence, but to the inexhaustibleness of being, the indescribable wealth of nature. The self-conscious, philosophically trained under- standing and intelligence has now the means of knowing that the accuracy of all investigation is limited, that for this reason all its future results will be affected by error. But a science which is backed up by such an enlightened understanding, is reconciled to its limitations and trans- forms them into a hall of glory. Self-conscious limita- tion is aware of its partnership in the absolute perfection of the universe. The self-conscious intellect improved by the positive product of philosophy knows that it can understand, de- scribe, the whole world in a natural, sensible way. There is nothing that can resist it. But in the sense of a tran- scendental metaphysics, our understanding is not worthy 1 12 THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OF PHILOSOPHY of that name. In return, this metaphysics is pure vagary in the eyes of critical reason. Taking its departure from fantastical ideals, from contradictions, especially between being and not being, metaphysics has gradually transformed itself in the course of civilization and become philosophy, which in its turn has progressed step by step the same as all other science. Philosophy was at first impelled by the nebulous de- sire for universal world wisdom and has finally assumed the form of a lucid special investigation of the theory of understanding. This theory is part, and the most essential part at that, of psychology or the science of the soul. Modern psychologists have at least devined, if not recognized, that the human soul is not a metaphysical thing, but a phenomenon. Like Professor Haeckel, they also com- plain about the dead classification in their specialty. The human soul is presented to them as a multitude of facul- ties. There is the faculty of understanding, of feeling, of perceiving, etc., without number and end. But how is life infused into them? Where is the consistent connec- tion ? There is, for instance, the conception and feeling of beauty in the human soul. The beautiful again is divided into the artistically beautiful and the ethically beautiful, and each of these into other subdivisions. There is beside the beautiful also the pretty, the charming, the graceful, the dignified, the noble, the solemn, the splen- did, the pathetic, the touching. Psychology also treats of the ridiculous, of the joke, the wit, the satire, the irony, the humor, of a thousand subtleties and distinctions, the CONCLUSION 443 ideological separation of which it attempts just as do botany, zoology, and every other sience in their field. To all of them, being is the object of study. What is the use of metaphysics under these circumstances? Only because it had in mind a different being, a trans- cendental one, could it induce Kant to sum up all his studies in the question: How is metaphysics possible as a science? It is the merit of philosophy to have demonstrated that metaphysics is possible only as fantastical specula- tion. It is the business of metaphysics to treat being tran- scendentally. It is the business of special sciences to classify being after the manner of herbarium botany. Classical order is already present in the vegetable king- dom, otherwise no specialist in botany could classify it. But the objective arrangement of the vegetable king- dom in infinitely more multiform than the subjective ar- rangement of botany. The latter is always excellent, if it corresponds to the scientific progress of its period. Who- ever is looking for absolute botany or psychology, or for any other absolute science, misunderstands the univer- sally natural character of the absolute as well as the relative special character of the human faculty of under- standing. Philosophy familiar with its historical achievement understands being as the infinite material of life and science which is taken up by the special sciences and classified by them. It teaches the specialists to remem- ber throughout all their classifications according to de- partments and concepts that all specialties are connected by life and not so separated in life as they are in science, but that they are flowing and passing into one another. 444 THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OE PHILOSOPHY Thus our science of understanding finally culminates in the rule : Thou shalt sharply divide and subdivide and farther subdivide to the utmost the universal concept, the concept of the universe, but thou shalt be backed up by the consciousness that this mental classification is a formality by which man seeks for the sake of his in- formation to register and to place his experience ; thou shalt furthermore remain aware of thy liberty to pro- gressively improve the experience acquired by thyself in the course of time", by modifying thy classification. Things are ideas, ideas are names, and things, ideas, and names arc subject to continuous perfection. Stable motion and mobile stability constitute the reconciling contradiction which enables us to reconcile all contradictions. THE END RD 18 o" ♦* 5T. AUGUSTINE FLA. 32084^ *& ■a. 5°vA • **^ v