Source: Project Gutenberg www.gutenberg.org;

Translated: by Ernest Untermann.

Title: The positive outcome of philosophy: The Nature of Human Brain Work; Letters on Logic. The Positive Outcome of Philosophy;

Written: by Joseph Ditezgen, with an introduction by Anton Pannekoek, edited by Eugene Dietzgen;

First Published: by Charles. H. Kerr &amp; Co., Chicago 1906;

Transcribed: by Kavindu Herath.

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 learning the trade of my father in my paternal shop, when I saw in the “Kölnische Zeitung,” how the people of Berlin 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 enthusiasm for a cause and understanding of that cause are two different things. Mark, for instance, the zeal displayed by Catholic peasants in singing their mass, although 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 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 Fatherland,” and the “Neue Rheinische,” the organ of “Democracy,” 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 aristocracy 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 ecclesiastical 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 descending from the results of philosophy, primarily from the Hegelian school. Both of them were armed with the philosophical achievements of the century, which they had not only mechanically assimilated, but rather continually provided with fresh food like a living being.

In the beginning of the fifties, a pamphlet was published by one of the cross bearers, Stahl, entitled “Against Bunsen.” This Bunsen was at the time the Prussian Embassador 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 tolerant and indifferent, but must push its propaganda with fire and sword.

In the same way in which Stahl defended the interests 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 “Communist 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 constitutionalists or the liberals conceal the liberty of the money bag. Under these circumstances, they are quite right in demanding German unity with Prussia as a head, or a republic with a grand duke at the top. The landed aristocracy 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 individual liberties and rights, that are opposed to one another 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 1869 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 to the author and to his predecessors. But that is an interminable 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 interdependence of things, and this also throws a bright light on the question of mine and thine.

J. Dietzgen.

Chicago, March 30, 1887

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 respectable and distinguished, but which has in the meantime acquired a somewhat ludicrous taste, the name of wisdom. This gradual transition of wisdom into science is a positive achievement of philosophy which well deserves 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 there was no such distinction in ancient times. We remember 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 information 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 shoemaking 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 understanding 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 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 object. 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 understanding 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 experience 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 modern times.

A short while ago, Shakespeare attracted much attention, when some one claimed to have discovered that it was not he who wrote those famous dramas and tragedies, 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 rubbish 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 practical 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 science 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 wealth 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 philosophy produced by evolution. But this is not everything. 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 social 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 respect the prominent philosophers, but their works also reveal a rich mine of special and comprehensive knowledge.

All sciences are closely related, for advances in one branch are preparations for advances in others. Astronomy 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 knowledge has resulted. No science has as yet arrived at completeness and perfectness. We have as yet more the results of experimental effort than accomplished perfection. 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 succeed 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 evolution, 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 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 unreliability 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 vaporings, 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 accomplishment of philosophy. The total process of evolution has placed the philosophers on their feet.

There is no doubt that up to the present time, philosophy 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 demonstrated by the dissensions of the educated and uneducated on all questions pertaining to wisdom of life. Socrates 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 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 applying 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 intellectual 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 prevented the most advanced minds from penetrating deeper into this obscure question. The history of philosophy is 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 understanding, intelligence, reason, intellect, etc.? So long as this question is unsettled, the questioner is entitled to dispense with any and all sections and subsections of the intellectual object and to regard the various names as synonymous.

The main accomplishment in the solution of this question 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 elucidate 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 everything 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 phenomena, which has rendered its understanding very difficult 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 understanding.

III. 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 unconsciously 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, subservient, limited and restricted emanation of the unlimited divine spirit. This terrestrial emanation was regarded 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 remain in the unscrutable darkness of faith and intuition, or whether it may penetrate boldly and without hindrance into the infinity of the physical and chemical universe.

We here desire to claim as a positive outcome of philosophy that it has at last acquired the clear and exact knowledge that a socalled infinite spirit, in the religious 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 remembered that such a separation has only a theoretical 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, becomes 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 microscope. Nevertheless the vision remains limited, even though it may 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 knowing. The human intellect is thus degraded to the position of a substitute of some “higher” intellect which is not discovered, but must be “believed” to exist in 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 subject 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 tendency 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 understanding than the human one. One might as well think of a higher horse which runs with eight, sixteen, or sixteen 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.

It is true that all things, including our understanding, 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 achievements of philosophy have shown, has an intellect of as universal a power as any that can be imagined, required, or found, in heaven or on earth.

We 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 especially 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 faculties 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 human mind. About a hundred years ago, the philosopher Kant found it appropriate to draw the sword against those who played fast and loose 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 perfect, 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 mystery. Now it is recognized as a finite, natural phenomenon, 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, immeasurable, 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 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 I 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 unfathomable 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 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 understanding of the present day no longer muses over nature in general in the fantastic and mere introspective 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 reasonably and intelligibly in all other parts of nature.

The inexperienced powers of distinction which did not understand their function, magnified the difference between the infinite and its finite phenomena out of all proportion. Now that we have made the philosophical 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 universal being, this nature to which all contradictory attributes may be simultaneously assigned, in a certain 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 unreason, 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 eternally moves in affirmations and negations, in order to obtain a clear picture of things, it has 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 realize that it is not an exception from general nature, but a natural 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 differ materially from the problem itself. The contradictions are solved only by reasonable differentiation, only by the science of understanding which shows that extravagant differences are nothing but extravagant speculations. The human understanding inclines to exaggerations in its untrained state, and it is a relic of untrained habits to differentiate in an absolute manner the spiritual from the rest of nature, to make a too extravagant distinction between it and the physical 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 exaggerated, but only graduated distinctions. For this purpose 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 designate 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” individual piece of it, and, furthermore, that every other and different part is really nothing different but a uniform 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 understanding into East and West, South and North, and into a hundred thousand other named parts, is yet an undivided 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.

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 meanings, designating now the physical brain, now its mental 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 philosophy still follows the habit of regarding the physical body as something different from the mind. A distinction 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 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 differentiation, 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 understand simply means to obtain a general and at the same time a detailed view of the processes and products 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 metaphysics attribute to it. The infinite universe is by no means niggardly in its gifts to the human understanding. 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.

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 Theodore Fechner, a forgotten star on the literary firmament, 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, Christianity, 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 being stirred. A glory of light was diffused over it all. It was only a small piece of the Earth. It was only 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 finding them anywhere. But people 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 infinite 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 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 remains in his brain. It is this spleen which I intend to deal with in the proper light, in order to thus demonstrate 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 understanding 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 inspired 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 individual human soul, there has lately arisen a “psychology 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 different 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 universal animal soul, including the souls of lions, tigers, flies, elephants, mice, etc.? If we now extend the generalization farther and include in our psychology the vegetable and the mineral kingdom, the various 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 fantastical dreams. By this method one can transform anything into everything. It is necessary to supplement 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 omission has often been committed by the zoologists in the museums and the botanists in their plant collections, and philosophical investigators of the soul like Fechner have drifted into the other extreme of generalization 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 interconnection, 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 penetrate 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, 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 intellect 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 purpose. Whether I endeavor to explain the general nature of scientific study, whether I investigate the intellect 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 different 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 perceive. 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 philosophers 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 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 consists 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 difference 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 ethereal 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 discriminate, 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 everything 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 exaggerate their differences to the extreme of making them senseless.

We do not intend to follow this theory of a universal 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..”.. “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 consciousness 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 imaginable, 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 universal 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 requires more detailed classification. Thus we finally arrive at the class of human souls forming a department 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 propounding 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 valuation of the difference between the true and the figurative sense of a word.

Words are names which do not, and cannot, have any other function than that of symbolic illustration. 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 instrument 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 phenomena 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 understanding 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 philosopher. It must be the work of all science, and philosophy as a doctrine of science must acknowledge that.

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. Without 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 unless 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 practice, and this theoretical separation must be accompanied 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 distinctions. Hence we must not make any such distinction 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.

Now, if I claim that the conception of the universe is innate in us, the reader must not conclude that I believe in the old prejudice of the human intellect being like a receptacle filled with ideas of the true, the beautiful, the good, and so forth. No, the intellect can create 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 everything; 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 conception 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 consciousness[1], 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 manner, 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 universal 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 themselves, 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 wonderful 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 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 special study gives us a new and much better understanding 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 presuppose something innate. The one contradicts the other only in those brains who do not understand the positive outcome of philosophy. Such thinkers do not know how to make reasonable distinctions and exaggerate in consequence. They have not grasped the conciliation of all differences and contradictions in universal nature by which all contradictions are solved.

Philosophy has endeavored to understand the intellect. In demonstrating the positive outcome of philosophy, we must explain that philosophical understanding as well as any other does not rise out of the isolated faculty of understanding, but out of the universal 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, 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 inseparable 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 particularly 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 accomplished 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 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 something different and antagonistic. Yet the rules of language heretofore in vogue cannot prevent the spread of the additional knowledge that the universe, or general nature, is so unlimited that it can establish a conciliation between these limited antagonisms. The cat and the dog, for instance, are pronounced enemies, but nevertheless zoology recognizes them as being legitimate domestic companions.

Human consciousness is, in the first place, individual. 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 consciousness of the universe, at least that is its possibility and mission. Not 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 philosophy to teach us that a limit, a thing, or a world outside 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 intellect, 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 faculty of thought is born with the capability of grasping 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 conception 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 by bonds which permit of the greatest variety in individual differences and are not nullified even by the distance 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 picture 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 distinctions, no unrelated extremes, in the universe. The infinite is related to the finite. For all developed and perishable things are the direct offspring of the imperishable, of the eternal universe. General nature and its special parts are inseparably interlaced. There is nothing among all that has a name which is fundamentally different from other things known by name.

There will hardly be any objection against these sentences, until we proceed to draw their last consequences. If all things are related and without exception 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 understanding and other natural human faculties must not be magnified into that of irreconcilable extremes.

In order to become accustomed to scientific distinctions, 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 a distinction is exaggerated and illogical, and whoever believes in it does not know how to discriminate scientifically 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 reality. 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 functions. The construction of languages explains in a way the condition of the human mind which had only inadequate knowledge of itself so far. Those shortcomings 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 enlightenment.

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 indicating 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, universe, cosmos.

This diagrammatic construction of language furnishes us with an illustration of the graduated relationship of things and of the way in which the human race arrives at its knowledge, its perceptions or pictures.

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 unavoidable misunderstanding of the universal relationship 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 mysterious 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 occasionally 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 appreciation 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 language to the distinction between physics and metaphysics, 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 dollars 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 express the different realities within the compass of the unit.

The understanding of these peculiarities of language is calculated to promote the insight and enlightenment 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 elementary 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 alphabet and other primary topics are universal. Every one must use his brains and should therefore take pains to understand its processes. Though the knowledge 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 frequently 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 materialists on the other from coming to a peaceful understanding 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, ponderable, commensurable things on the other. True, the reason for this lack of terms is the absence of understanding, and for this reason the dispute is not one of mere words, although it can be allayed only by an improvement of our terminology.

Büchner, in his well-known work on “Force and Matter,” likewise overlooks this point, the same as all prior materialists, because they are as onesidedly insistent on their matter as the idealists 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 philosophy which teaches that all distinctions must be reasonable, because neither our instrument of thought nor the rest of nature justify any exaggerated distinctions. In order to elucidate the moot question, nothing 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 working 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 consider 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 elephant, the lowest and the highest animal, the vegetable and the animal kingdom, the inorganic and the organic, as members of the same species or genus in a reasonable way, we must keep account of the gradations in nature, the transitions, the connecting links and connecting ideas. Embryology, which shows that the life of the highest animal develops through the stages of the animal genus, has greatly promoted the understanding 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 between the various grades which nature does not fill by an intermediary form.... There is no abrupt difference 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 I wish to base my argument on the acknowledged 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 distinction between matter and mind.

VIII. Understanding Is Material

Whether we say that philosophy has the understanding for the object of its study, or whether we say that philosophy investigates the method of utilizing subjective understanding in order to arrive at genuine, 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 understanding, the thinking which takes place consciously or unconsciously 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 materially 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 perceptible 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 considering these two movements from the higher viewpoint of natural or material processes? If the function 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 material 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 common general name. But since we are much less concerned 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 meaning for these terms, all of them serve equally well and are equally deceptive.

The positive outcome of philosophy which culminates in placing the theory of understanding in the same class with all other theories, cannot be easily demonstrated on account of a natural confusion of thought which arises from an equally natural confusion of language. In the special department of handicraft 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 conceptions are expressed.

Wherever understanding is clear, there the language is also clear. The man who does not understand shoemaking does not understand its terminology. 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 philosophy 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 between things, and have learned to consider the differences 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 universal 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 contrary, this mechanical materialism wholly misunderstands 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 function. 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 universe. Because it misunderstands the relation of thing and function, of subject and predicate, it has no inkling 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 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 functions are natural things, substantial parts of the universe.

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 years 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 rendered uselessly voluminous by quotations from the works of the most prominent philosophical writers, without proving anything, since the words of one often contradict those of another.

What is said by Kant, Fichte, Schelling, or Hegel, in one place of any of their works, is at least considerably 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 I, 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 carries 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 reading brain.

The theory of understanding which has become the special object of philosophy, is nothing else, and cannot be anything else, but expanded logic. Many practical rules and laws of this department are known and recognized since the time of Aristotle. But the question whether there is one world or two, a natural and unnatural, or supernatural as it is called with preference, that is the point which has given much trouble to 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 Pedagogy, several editions of which have appeared, in which he gives much attention to logic. Dittes is a prominent pedagogue, well known through his writings. He confines himself in his School to teaching only that which is well established and accepted without a doubt. As a practical man who addresses himself 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 greatest 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 was burnt, everybody is sufficiently enlightened to 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 necessarily follows that all things are not individually independent, but related by sex, dependent children, “predicates” 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 phenomena, this is not to be discussed by logic.” The practical pedagogue who confines himself to the education 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 understanding. And its product, recognized truth, is not truth itself, but merely a formal picture of it. Universal nature is the arch fountain, is the eternal and imperishable 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 independent 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 development.

Modern philosophy, beginning with Bacon of Verulam and closing with Hegel, carries on a constant struggle with the Aristotlean logic. The product of this struggle, 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 by which this purpose might be accomplished. As universally applicable rules, as principles or laws of thought, the following four have been named:

(1) The law of uniformity (identity).

(2) The law of contradiction.

(3) The law of the excluded third.

(4) 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 demonstration 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 conception must not be attributed to it.” The square is excluded from the conception of a circle, therefore the predicate “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.

Now 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.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, reflection of it. Peter and Paul, who according to the law of identity are the same all their lives, are in fact different fellows every minute and every day of their lives, and all things of this world are, like those two, not constant, 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 use only. The logical household use of stereotyped conceptions extends, and should extend, to all of science. The consideration of things as remaining “the same” is indispensable, and yet it is very salubrious to know and remember 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 picture of it. I have furthermore contended that the positive 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 dialectics 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 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, although 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 correctly 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 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 understanding is not only everywhere identical, but also different in each individual and has a historical development. We are, 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 development of these two, of man and understanding, backward 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 substance 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 recognized 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 temporarily fixed and yet not fixed.

Now let us briefly review the fourth fundamental law of logic, according to which everything must have an adequate 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 justified 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 dialectic 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 interconnection of the opposites, forgot that thought is a 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 essence 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 transcendentally and elevated it far above the phenomena. All phenomena of nature are true parts of truth. Even error and lies are not opposed to truth in that exaggerated sense in which the old style logic represents them, which teaches that two contradictory 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 existing 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 narrow minded, its development had to produce that dialectics 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. Whoever wishes to obtain understanding, must confine himself to something special, without, however, through this limitation losing sight of all measure and aim to such an extent that he forgets the infinite generality.

A modern psychologist 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 understanding, every true conception or knowledge, must be based on the clear consciousness that the infinite universe is the arch fundament of all things.

Understanding and true enlightenment are identical. “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 struggle 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 sentence. “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 enlightenment, viz., that genuine knowledge and enlightenment must, so to say, take their departure from religious motives. But we differ a little as to what motives are religious. 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 religious 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 dividing 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 can decide that, nor is the pope a scientific authority in the matter.

It is mainly due to the so-called 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 possible, 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 maintain it.

This is easily understood, if we remember the repeatedly quoted dialectic rule according to which our understanding must never exaggerate the distinctions between two things. We must not too widely separate the religious from the secular field. Of course, the religious field is in heaven, while the secular is naturally in the profane universe. Having become aware that even religious imagination, together with its heaven and spirit creator, are profane conceptions in spite of their alleged transcendentalism, 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 applied 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 phenomena is, although even the imperishable whole is composed 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 conception of the human mind as well as of the understanding and enlightenment which it acquires. This mind cannot enlighten itself as to its special nature without observing 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 constant, 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 considered, 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 conception 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 defined; likewise religion. If we say, for instance, that religion 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 material process, the nature of which is sublime enough to be worthy of religious devotion, and yet special and matter-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 discussion to the realm of infinity. The conception of infinity, 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 reason. 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 repeal 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 resulting from enlightenment, is a negation. In seeking enlightenment, 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 enlightenment 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 religious. But if we desire to become enlightened as to 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 venerated, 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 cultivated for their own sake, but must serve the purpose of human development, the material interests of which demand 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 philosophers, not overfond of any particular school, and only about two hands’ breadth removed from our position. But this is just enough to demonstrate by his shortcomings the advantages of our position which proves that the part of the human soul performing the work of thinking is understood by us at least two hands’ breadth better than by this prominent psychologist.

“The function of enlightenment is to recognize that no phenomenon can be an effect which has not another phenomenon as its cause, and to search for the sole cause of every effect, noting all its parts and their consecutive divisions.”

These words describe the mental work performed by the human brain fairly well, but still they require a little addition, to the effect that the mental work is no exception from any other phenomena, all of which have not alone their special, but also one general cause. The cause of all causes, of which religion is making an idol, must be profaned, so to speak, by the cult of science, so that the above definition of Lazarus regarding enlightenment would read as follows: The sole and true cause of all effects is the universe, or the general interdependence of all things. But this is not by far the full scope of enlightenment. It is further necessary, as Lazarus well says, to note “all its parts and their consecutive divisions.” We further add: The universal cause must be understood not alone in its consecutive parts, but also in its co-ordinate parts. It is only then that understanding, enlightenment, become perfect. We then find that after all the relation between cause and effect, or the relation between the universal truth and its natural phenomena, is not a very trenchant one, but a relative one.

“Enlightenment advances in various, in all, fields of mental life. Religious enlightenment has long been recognized as the most essential, justly so, and for many reasons, the chief of them being that religious enlightenment is the most important and hence the most bitterly contested.”

Thus religious enlightenment is a part of universal, cosmic, enlightenment. It is a confusing expression to say that it is confined to “all fields of mental life.” We believe to be shedding more light on the question by saying that there is enlightenment in all fields, not alone in the mental, but also in the cosmic, which unites both the material and mental. To classify this field, that is the exhaustive task of our understanding, that its exhaustive definition.

XI. The Distinction Between Cause and Effect Is One of the Means of Understanding

The processes of the human mind and their subjective composition cannot be analyzed in a pure state and without regard to their objective effects any more than handiwork can be explained without the raw material to be handled and the products derived therefrom, any more than any work can be described in a pure state without regard to the product.

That is the sad defect of old time logic which is an obstacle to its further advance: it literally tears things out of their connections and forgets the necessity of interdependence over the need of special study.

The instrument which produces thought and knowledge in the human brain is not an isolated thing, nor an isolated quality. It is connected not only with the brain and the nervous system, but also with all qualities of the soul. True, thinking is different from feeling, but it is nevertheless a feeling the same as gladness and sorrow. Thought is called incomprehensible and the heart unfathomable. It is the function of science, of thinking and thought, to fathom and comprehend what as yet is not fathomed and not comprehended.

Just as thinking and understanding are parts of the human soul, so the latter is a part of physical and intellectual man. Together with the physical development of man, of the species as well as of the individual, the soul also develops and with it that part which is the special object of the theory of understanding, viz., thought and thinking. Not alone does physical development produce intellectual development, but, vice versa, the understanding reacts on the physical world. The one is not merely a cause, nor the other merely an effect. This obsolete distinction does not suffice for the full understanding of their interrelations. We pay a tribute to the “thoughts on enlightenment” of Professor Lazarus quoted in the previous chapter by acknowledging that they throw so much light on a certain point that little more than the dot over the “i” is required in order to clear up a bad misunderstanding about the relation of cause and effect.

Since the time of Aristotle this relation has been called a category. We have already noted the statement which characterizes the age of enlightenment as one in which the causal category, or let us say the distinction between cause and effect, became the dominant issue. Other periods live with their understanding, with their thoughts, in other categories. Though the ancient Greeks knew the distinction between cause and effect, yet it was far from being the dominant point of view in their search after scientific understanding. Instead of regarding, as we do today, everything as effects which were produced by preceding causes, they saw in every process, in every phenomenon, a means which had a purpose. The category of means and purpose dominated the Greeks. Socrates admired the knowledge of nature displayed by Anaxagoras, the stories he could tell of sun, moon, and stars. But as Anaxagoras had omitted to disclose the reasonable purpose of the processes of nature, Socrates did not think much of such a natural science. At that period the means and the purpose were the measure of reason, the handle of the mind, the category of understanding; today causes and effects have taken their places.

Between the golden age of Greece and the era of modern science, the so-called night of the Middle Ages, the epoch of superstition, extends. If then you started out on a voyage and first met an old woman, it meant misfortune for you. Wallenstein cast the horoscope before he directed his troops. “Understanding” was gathered from the flight of a bird, the cry of an animal, the constellations of stars, the meeting with an old woman. The category of that period was the sign and its consequences.

And according to Lazarus, these things were believed by brains which were by no means dull. “I refer to a name which fills us all with veneration: Kepler believed in astrology, in the category of the sign and its consequence, together with the thinkers of the thousand years before him and of his own century. Astrology was a science for many centuries, promoted together with astronomy ... and by the same people.”

The peculiar thing in this statement is the reference to the category of sign and consequence as a science. This category has no longer a place in modern science.

May not our modern viewpoint, the category in which our present day science thinks, the category of cause and effect, be equally transitory?

The ancients have accomplished lasting scientific results in spite of their “purposes.” Mediæval superstition with its “signs,” its astrology and alchemy, has likewise bequeathed to us a few valuable scientific products. And, on the other hand, even the greatest partisans of modern science do not deny that it is marred by various adventurous vagaries.

The categories of means and purposes, of signs and consequences, are still in vogue today and will be preserved together with that of causes and effects. The knowledge that this latter category is likewise but a historical one and exerts but temporarily a dominating influence on science belongs to the positive outcome of philosophy, and Professor Lazarus, with all his advanced standpoint, has remained behind this result by about a yard.

Kindly note that it is not the extinction of the relation between cause and effect which we predict, but merely that of its dominance.

Whoever skips lightly over the current of life, will be greatly shocked when reading that we place the fundamental pillar of all perception, the category of cause and effect, in the same passing boat in which the prophets and astrologers rode. One is very prone to belittle the faith of others by the name of “superstition” and honor one’s own superstition by the title of “science.”

Once we have grasped the fact that our intellect has no other purpose than that of tracing a human picture of cosmic processes, and that its penetration of the interior of nature, its understanding, explaining, perceiving, knowing, etc., is nothing else, and cannot be anything else, that moment it loses its mysterious, transcendental metaphysical character. We also understand then, that the great spirit above the clouds who is supposed to create the world out of nothing, could very well serve the mind as a means of explaining things. And it is the same with the category of cause and effect, which is a splendid means of assisting explanation, but still will not suffice for the requirements of all time to come.

The perception that the great spirit above the clouds is a free invention of the small human mind has become so widely spread that we may well pass on over it to other things.

Among the questions now on the order of business is the one whether the “causes” with which modern science operates so widely are not in a way creators in miniature which produce their effects in a sleight-of-hand way. And this erroneous notion is, indeed, the current conception.

If a stone falls into the water, it is the cause of the undulations, but not their creator. It is only a co-operator, for the liquid and elastic qualities of the water also act as a cause. If the stone falls into butter, it creates at best but one undulation, and if this stony creator falls on the hard ground, it is all up with the creation of undulations. This shows that causes are not creators, but rather effects which are not effected, but effect themselves.

The category of cause and effect is a good help in explanation, so long as it is accompanied by the philosophical consciousness that the whole of nature is an infinite sea of transformations, which are not created by one great or many small creators, but which create themselves.

A well-known philosophical author expresses himself in the following manner: “During the first weeks of its existence, the child has no perception either of the world without, or of its own body, or of its soul. Hence its feeling is not accompanied by the consciousness of an interaction between these three factors. It does not suspect its causes.” We see that soul, body, and outer world are called the three factors of feeling. Now note how each one of these three causes or factors is, so to say, the store house of innumerable factors or causes, all of which cause the feeling of the child. The soul consists of many soul parts, the body of many bodily parts, and the outer world consists of so many parts that it would consist of ten times more parts, if there were any more than innumerable.

There is no doubt that the child’s feeling, or any other, does not exist independently, but is dependent on the soul, the body, and the outer world. This constitutes the indubitable interrelation of all things. In the winding processes of the self-agitated universe, the category of cause and effect serves as a means of enlightenment, by giving our mind its help in the systematization of processes. If the drop of a stone precedes, the undulations of the water follow; if soul, body, and outer world are present, feeling follows.

The positive outcome of philosophy does not reject the services of the category of cause and effect. It only rejects the mystical element in that category in which many people, even among those with a “scientific education,” still believe. There is no witchcraft in this matter, but simply a mechanical systematization and classification of natural phenomena in the order of their appearance. So long as water remains water and retains its liquid and elastic properties, and so long as a stone is a stone, a ponderous fellow striking the water heavily, just so long will the splash of the stone be surely and inevitably followed by undulations of the water. So long as soul, body, and outer world retain their known properties, they will with unfailing precision produce feeling. It is no more surprising that we can affirm this on the strength of our experience than that we have a category of cause and effect. There exists nothing extraordinary but the condition of things, and in this respect all things are alike, so that human understanding, cause and effect, or any other category, are no more extraordinary than any other condition. The only wonder is the universe, but this, being a universal wonder, is at the same time trivial, for nothing is so familiar as that which is common to all.

By the help of the viewpoint of cause and effect, man throws light on the phenomena of nature. Cause and effect serve to enlighten us about the world.

The way, the method, by which this enlightenment is produced, is the special object of our study. We do not deny that cause and effect serve us as a means, but only as one of many. We honor the category of cause and effect far too much when we regard it as the panacea. We have seen that formerly other viewpoints served the same purpose and still others exist today, some of which have a prospect of being valued more highly in the future than cause and effect. This category serves very well for the explanation of processes which follow one another. But there are other phenomena which occur side by side, and these must also be elucidated. For such a purpose, the category of genus and species is quite as serviceable. Haeckel speaks somewhat slightingly of “museum zoologists and herbarium botanists,” because they merely classify animals and plants according to genera and species. The modern zoologists and botanists do not simply consider the multiplicity of animals and plants which exist simultaneously, but also the chronological order of the changes and transformations, and in this way they have gained much more of a life-picture of the zoological and botanical world, a picture not alone of its being, but also of its growing, of arising and declining. Undoubtedly the knowledge of the museum zoologists and herbarium botanists was meager, narrow, mechanical, and modern science offers a far better portrait of truth and life. Still this is no reason for overestimating the value of analysis by cause and effect. This method supplements the category of genus and species. It assists in enlightening, it helps in the process of thought, but it does not render other forms of thought superfluous.

It is essential for the theory of understanding, to recognize the special forms of thought of old and new times as peculiarities which have a common nature. This common nature of the process of thought, understanding, enlightenment, is a part of the universal world process, and not greatly different from it.

The conception of a cause partly explains the phenomena of the universe; but so does the conception of a purpose and of a species, in fact, so do all conceptions.

In the universe all parts are causes, all of them caused, produced, created, and yet there is no creator, no producer, no cause. The general produces the special, and the latter in turn produces by reaction the general.

The category of the general and the special, of the universe and its parts, contains all other categories in the germ. In order to explain the process of thought, we must explain it as a part of the universal process. It has not caused the creation of the world, neither in a theological nor in an idealist sense, nor is it a mere effect of the brain substance, as the materialists of the eighteenth century represented it. The process of thought and its understanding is a peculiarity of the universal cosmos. The relation of the general to the special is the clear and typical category underlying all other categories.

One might also apply other names to this category, for instance, the one and the many; the essence and the form; the substance and its attributes; truth and its phenomena, etc. However, a name is but a breath and a sound; understanding and comprehension are what we want in the first place.

XII. Mind and Matter: Which Is Primary, Which Secondary?

It is the merit of the philosophical outcome to have delivered the process of understanding from its mystic elements. So long as cause and effect are not recognized as a form of thought belonging to the same species with many other forms of thought, all of which serve the common purpose of illuminating the cosmic processes for the human mind by a symbolized picture composed of various conceptions, just so long will something mysterious adhere to the category of cause and effect.

Philosophy is particularly engaged in illuminating the understanding. It has learned enough of its specialty to know that it is a part of the universe performing the special function of arranging the world of phenomena and its smaller circles according to relations of consanguinity and chronology. Such an arrangement presents a scientific picture of the world. The well-known diagram of conceptions used by logicians, consisting of a large circle symbolizing the general, inside of which smaller circles crossing and encircling one another represent the specialties, is a fitting aid in explaining the method by which the faculty of understanding arrives at its scientific results. Science in general is the sum of all special kinds of knowledge, differing from them in no greater degree than the human body from the various organs of which it is composed. A bodily organ can no more exist outside of the body than any particular knowledge can exist outside of the generality of all sciences. No metaphysics is possible under this condition.

As surely as we know that two mountains cannot be without a valley between them, just so surely do we know that nothing in heaven, on earth, or in any other place can lie outside of the general circle of things. Outside of the worldly world there can be no other little world. A logically constituted human mind cannot think differently. And it is likewise impossible to discover such an outside world by the help of and within the limits of experience, because thought is inseparable from experience and there can be no experience without thought. A man who has a head upon his shoulders – and there can be no man without a head – cannot experience any unworldly metaphysical world. The faculty of experience, which includes the faculty of understanding or perception, is merely empirical. Our settled conviction of the unity of the universe is an inborn logic. The unity of the world is the supreme and most universal category. A closer look at it at once reveals the fact that it carries its opposite, the infinite multiplicity, under its heart or in its womb. The general is pregnant with specialties.

This is a comparison, and comparisons limp. A mother has other qualities beside that of motherhood, while the universe, or the absolute generality, is nothing but the bearer, the cause, of all special and separate things. It is “pure” motherhood which can no more be without children than the children without a mother. In this way, no cause can be without effects. A cause without an effect – let us dismiss it. The child is as much a cause in motherhood as it is its effect and product. In the same way the universe has never been, and could not be conceived, without the many special children which it carries in its womb.

If thought wishes to make for itself a picture, a conception of the cause of all causes, it must necessarily take cognizance of the effects. Thought may very well separate one from the other, but cannot think correctly without the consciousness that its separating and distinguishing is only a formality. Imagining, conceiving, knowing, perceiving, are so many formalities.[2]

But philosophy took its departure from the opposite, the wrong, view. It regarded perceiving, understanding, as the main thing. It did not use science as a formality, as something secondary, as something serving a nature, a cause, a purpose, a higher reason, but it started with the illogical and irrelevant assumption that the specialty of mind, understanding, conceiving, judging, distinguishing, is the primary, supreme, self-constituted cause and purpose, instead of being an element in logic. Even in Hegel’s logic, which, by the way, has given us much light on the process of thought, this confounding of the original with the copy is the cause of an almost impenetrable mysticism.

Not nature, but science is to those idealist philosophers the source of truth. The “true idea” surpassed everything with them. This “idea” is forced by Hegel to roll about, and wind, and twist as if it were not a natural child, but a metaphysical dragon. But we cannot deny that in these twistings and windings of the Hegelian dragon the condition of the mind is exposed in all its peculiarities and nakedness.

According to Hegel’s theosophical opinion I do not become aware of my friend in material intercourse and bodily touch. Hegel’s mark of a true friend is not that he proves true in life, but that he corresponds “to his idea.” The “idea” of true friendship is for the idealist the measure of friendly truth, just as Plato measures the ideal or true condition of states and cooking pots of this valley of sorrows by the standard of an “idea” of the state, or an “idea” of the cooking pot, supposed to be derived from some other world.

It is surely a valuable gift of nature that the human mind can form its ideals. But it is a gift that has also caused much trouble and which requires for its higher development the clear understanding that ideals are constructed out of real materials. Without this understanding the human race will never succeed in making a reasonable use of its ideal faculty. The beautiful ideal of true friendship may stimulate us to emulation. But the knowledge that it is nothing but an ideal which in reality is always mixed with a little falseness serves as no mean antidote against sentimental transcendentalism. And the same holds true of truth, liberty, justice, equality, brotherhood, etc.

The striving after an ideal is very good, but it does no harm to be conscious of the fact and clearly see that any ideal can never be realized without some admixture of its opposite. What is it that Lessing says? “If God were to offer me the search for truth in his left hand, and truth in his right, I should grasp his left hand and say: Father, keep truth, it is for you alone.”

It has not been the task of philosophy to give us a true mind picture of the world. This it cannot do, this cannot be done by any scientific specialty. It may be done by the totality of sciences, and even by them only approximately. Even with them striving is a higher truth and of higher value than knowing. I repeat, then: It is not the particular task of philosophy to furnish a true picture of the world, but rather to investigate the method by which the human mind arrives at its world pictures. That is its work, and it is the object of this book to sketch its outline.

A sketch is in itself an inexact piece of work. I may be blamed for jumbling together such terms as world, cosmos, universe, nature, or such others as ideas, judgment, conclusion, thought, mind, intellect, etc., and for using them as synonyms when many of them have already been assigned their fixed meaning in the classification of science. But this is the point which I emphasize, that the method of science, of thought, has the twofold nature of making fixed terms and still remaining pliable.

Science not only defines what this or that is, but also how it moves, how it originates, passes away, and still remains; how it is fixed and yet at the same time moving. The real being of which science treats, viz., the universe, is not alone present, but also past and future, and it is not alone this or that, but it is everything. Even nothing is something belonging to the aggregate life.

This dialectic statement is rather incomprehensible to the unphilosophical brain. Nothing and something are conceptions so widely diverging from one another in the unphilosophical mind that they seem far more apart than heavenly bliss is supposed to be separated from earthly misery, according to the declarations of clergymen. Clergymen are transcendental logicians, and it is likewise transcendental to regard nothing as an absolute nothing. It cannot be denied that it is at least a conception or a term. Therefore, whether little or much, it is something. We cannot get out of existence, out of the universe, any more than Münchhausen can pull himself out of a swamp by his pigtail.

There can be no absolute nothing, because the absolute is synonymous with the universe, and everything else is relative. So it is also with nothing. It simply has the significance of not being the main thing. To say: This is nothing means it is not that which is essential at this time and place. This man is nothing simply means that he is not a man out of the ordinary, and it does not at all signify that he is nothing at all.

The category of being and not being, like all categories[3], which appear as something fixed to the sound but ill-informed mind, is really something shifting. Its poles fuse and flow into one another, its differences are not perfectly radical. These categories give us an illustration of the mobile universe, which is a unit composed of its opposite, multiplicity.

The positive outcome of philosophy has for its climax the understanding that the world is multifarious, and that this multiplicity is uniform in possessing the universal nature in common. The sciences must represent these objects in such a contradictory way, because all things live in reality in this contradiction. What the museum zoologists and the herbarium botanists have accomplished on the field of zoology and botany in the category of space, has been accepted by the Darwinians with the addition of the variety of those subjects in the category of time. Either class of scientists categorizes, classifies, systematizes. The chemists do the same with substances and forces, and so does Hegel with his categories of being and not being, quantity and quality, substance and attribute, thing and quality, cause and effect, etc. He makes all things flow into one another, rise, pass, move, and he is right in doing so. Everything moves and belongs together.

But that which Hegel missed and which is added by us consists in the further perception that the flow and the variability of the categories just quoted is only an illustration of the necessary variability and interaction of all thoughts and conceptions, which are, and must be, nothing but illustrations and reflexes of the universal life.

However, the idealist philosophers who have all of them contributed materially toward this ultimate special knowledge, are still more or less under the mistaken impression that the process of thinking is the true process and the true original, and that the true original, nature or the material universe, is only a secondary phenomenon. We now insist on having it understood that the cosmic interaction of phenomena, the universal living world, is the truth and life.

Is the world a concept? Is it an idea? It may be conceived and grasped by the mind, but it does and is more than that. It surpasses our understanding in the past, the present, and the future. It is infinite in quantity and quality. How do we know that? We say in the same breath that we do not know everything which is passing, has passed, and will pass in the world; we do not understand the whole, and yet we claim to have fully understood that this whole universe is not a mere idea, but something absolute, something more than a conception or an intuitive knowledge, something real and true, something infinite. How do we solve this contradiction?

The science of the limitation of the individual and of the collective human intellect is identical with the universal concept; in other words, it is innate in the human intellect to know that it is a limited part of the absolute universe. This intellectual faculty of ours is no less natural and aboriginal than the faculty of trees to become green in summer and that of the spiders to spread their nets. Although the intellect is a limited part of the unlimited and aware of this fact, yet its faculty of knowing, understanding, judging, is a universal one. No intellect is possible or conceivable which can do more than the instrument of thought given by nature to the human race. We may indeed conceive of a mental giant. But when we take a closer look, every one will perceive that this mental giant cannot get outside of the traditional race of thinkers, unless he is supposed to be the creature of imagination.

Thinking, knowing, understanding, are universal. I can perceive all things in about the same way that I can see all cobble stones. I can see them all, but I cannot see everything that they are composed of, I cannot see, for instance, that they are heavy and ponderable. In the same way all things may be perceived, but not everything that belongs to them. They do not dissolve in understanding, in other words, understanding is only a part of the universe, all of which may be perceived, but the understanding of which is not the whole, since our intellect is but a part of the universe.

Everything may be understood, but understanding is not everything. Every pug-dog is a dog, but every dog is not a pug-dog. The conflict of idealism and materialism rests on this same conflict between genus and subordinate species. The idealist incarnate contends that all things are ideas, while we strive to make him see that ideal things and material things are two species of the same genus, and that they should be given a common family or general name beside their special name, on account of their common nature and for the purpose of a sound logic. Wherever this understanding has been acquired, the quarrel between idealists and materialists appears in the light of a mere bandying of words.

Everything is large, everything is small, everything extended through space and time, everything cause and everything effect, everything a whole and a part, because everything is the essence of everything, because everything is contained in the all, everything related, everything connected, everything interdependent. The conception of all as the absolute, the content of which consists of innumerable relativities, the concept of the all as the universal truth which reflects many phenomena, that is the basis of the science of understanding.

XIII. The Extent to Which the Doubts of the Possibility of Clear and Accurate Understanding Have Been Overcome

A contemporaneous professor of philosophy, Kuno Fischer, of Jena, says: “The problem of modern philosophy is the understanding of things.” But this problem does not occupy modern philosophy alone; it was also considered by ancient philosophy. Even more, it belongs to the whole world. All the world, I mean the whole human world, and especially the sciences, search after understanding. I do not say this for the purpose of setting the Professor right, for I acknowledge that he is a fairly deserving philosopher. If I cared to go through his works, I should surely find other passages which state the problem of philosophy more accurately and concretely, to the effect that philosophy does not strive merely for the indefinite “understanding of things,” but rather for the special understanding of that particular thing which bears the name of “understanding.” Philosophy at the climax of its development seeks to understand “understanding.” It has seriously attempted the solution of this problem so long as men think, so far as our historical records go.

After that which we have already said about the beginning and the end of things and about their immortality, it will be easily understood that the thing called understanding has no more historical beginning than all the rest. The known grows out of the unknown, the conscious out of the unconscious. Our modern consciousness, though agreeably cultivated, is still an undeveloped, unconscious consciousness. Nevertheless, development has gone far enough to make it plain that understanding is anti-religious. Especially the understanding of understanding, the outcome of positive philosophy, has a pronounced anti-religious, and to that extent “destructive,” tendency. But one should not have an exaggerated idea of this destruction. Here, under this sun, nothing is destroyed without leaving the basis for the growth of new life from the ruins. It belongs to the conception of the universe to understand that it is the main conception required for the conception of conception, for the understanding of understanding.

The history of philosophy begins with the decay of heathen religion, and the history of modern philosophy with the decay of Christian religion. Since religion must be preserved for the people according to the official declarations of the rulers, the official professors are not clear and accurate expounders of the positive outcome of philosophy. No matter how great the work of Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel may be, yet the followers of Kant and Hegel have no freedom of research, and Kuno Fischer, although very close to the root of the subject, is nevertheless doomed to remain in the mystification of the function of conceiving and of understanding. His profession clouds his judgment.

“Nature,” says this professor, “is regarded as the first object of understanding, as the principle from which everything else follows. In this respect modern philosophy is naturalistic. It is taken for granted that nature can be understood, or that the possibility of understanding things is given. Modern philosophy makes this assumption dogmatically.... The Kantian philosophy, on the other hand, assumes a critical, not a dogmatic, attitude toward the possibility of understanding.” (System of Logic and Metaphysics, by Kuno Fischer, second edition, pages 104 and 109.) In this latter, critical, stage, the subject is kept rather hot by the professors of philosophy. The critics are still engaged in exclaiming: Be 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 produced 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 remembered 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 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 thinking 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 transcendental 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 impossibility 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 the same time straight and crooked, true and untrue, light and dark. The excellence of this doctrine is easily apparent, 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, varicolored, fluid, variable phenomena or relativities.

In our times, up to which the theologians have speculated so much and contributed so little to understanding, one can hardly touch on the God concept without annoying 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 concepts. Not in vain have the first minds of modern philosophy, such as Cartesius, Spinoza, Leibniz, occupied themselves so closely with the God concept. They invented the so-called 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, therefore, 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 remain 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 supernatural and may be believed or divined. With this doctrine, he again made understanding, the object of modern philosophy, problematical, thus inviting us to investigate further.

This we have done, and it is now the positive outcome of philosophy to know clearly and definitely and understand 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 perfect being.

Philosophy took its departure from confused wrangling 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, reliable understanding. Now, in this world of ours, the solid is so mixed with the fluid, the imperishable with the perishable, that a total separation is impossible. Nevertheless our intellect catches itself continually making separations 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 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 definitely, excellently and substantially, how logical deductions should be made in order to arrive at positive understanding. 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 immortality, 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 watchfulness, 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 settled 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 understanding? Reliability and truth were at that time still identical.

Bacon and Descartes are the men who started the investigation. 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 himself 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 successor Descartes approached the matter more radically and pointedly.

Although in recent times the human mind had demonstrated its positive faculty of understanding in natural sciences, especially by inventions, still it was prejudiced by religious improbabilities in its great premises dealing 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 position of a principle and of a starting point for all understanding. Then he cannot doubt that he is at least searching for truth. He who does not believe in any understanding, 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 consciousness 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 statement that nothing is evident to man but his own subjective conception. And the ideology has been carried to the extreme of calling the whole world an idea, a phantasmagoria. 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 extravagant means in our times, I shall devote another chapter to this subject.

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 doubtful perceptions predominate, in the second period the evident ones. Our 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 supernatural into the circle of its activity, did so for the purpose 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 being, 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, one of them transcendental and extravagant, the other natural and within sober limits. Our sober task of demonstrating 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 unequivocal and evident in the progress of history.

In order to become clear on the problem of understanding, we must cease to turn our eyes to any one individual 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 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 understanding, 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 irreconcilable 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 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 understanding requires above all the backing of the conscious recognition that it is a limited part of the unlimited universe.

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 understanding.

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 consciously moderate, not exaggerated. The separation of the intellect from other objects or subjects when investigating 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 condition, 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 universal perceptions, and this again a proportionate part of the universal life.

That this evident universal life is not a mere semblance, not a ghost, not a baseless imagination, but the truth, is made evident to the thinking man by his consciousness, reason, common sense. True, he has been deceived 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 philosophy.

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 Kantian 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 distinction between the doubtful and the positive, the outcome of philosophy teaches us that it must be no excessive distinction, 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 philosophy – is no more evident than anything else and derives its existence not from itself, but from the universal life. This universal life from which thought derives its perceptions, from which understanding derives its enlightenment, does not only exist as a general thing, but also in the form of infinitely varied individualities. And generalization, the relation of things, their number and extension, are no more, and no less, infinite than individualization 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 individual. 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 become noticeable until after thousands of years, by accumulated changes. By classifying this contradictory, infinitely 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 universe, 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 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 vacillation 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, progressing; 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 classifications, conceptions, and sciences.

The fixed, impregnable, so-called apodictical facts are nothing but tautologies, if seen at close range. After it has become common usage to call only heavy and tangible 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 assurance 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 as fluid which we call fluid, but it does not change the fact that our faculty of understanding or perceiving gives us only an approximate picture 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 another.

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 reasonable sense, not in an extravagant one. Truth as the infinite, 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 understanding. The means is smaller than the purpose, is subordinate to purpose. So is our faculty of understanding only a subordinate servant of truth, of the universe. The latter 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 combined unity of all time and space.

It is sometimes said that this is too much for our intellect, 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 beginning of them. If that is not quite clear and plain, it 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, such a higher consciousness standing ever behind us, promotes a meek pride or a proud meekness which is well distinguished from the mental poverty of theologians, from the transcendental distinction between God and the world, between creator and creature. To us the perishable soul is not a narrow-minded servant for whom the plans of the imperishable monster soul are incomprehensible. 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 eternal, 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 becomes transcendental and insolent, it misconceives the relation of science to infinity. The latter is more than science, it is the object of science.

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 handed down to us by tradition, he should read the ancient metaphysicians and their followers, from Aristotle 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 disputes. 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, metaphysics 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 metaphysics. Hence it came into difficulties. Now our authority has just explained to us that the concept of 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 recognized by its agreements, not by its disputes.

The metaphysical disputes were overcome by philosophic science, which is the study of ideas or understanding, by arriving at a clear and plain theory of understanding, the demonstration of which I have here attempted.

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 metaphysical 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 revolved around this statement. It is based on something plausible, but still more on misunderstanding. Only when we 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 philosophy, does this stubbornly maintained and much contested statement receive a lasting value by its just modification.

In the first place, a “subject” is not a fixed, but a variable concept. In the last analysis, as we have sufficiently 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 subject, 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 somewhere 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 negation 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 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 expressed.

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 absolutely 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 belong 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 composition. 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 describing the processes of experience by division or classification. The famous scientist Haeckel may call this contemptuously “museum zoology” and “herbarium botany,” but he simply shows that he has not grasped the secret of the intellect, but still wonders at it in a metaphysical way, the same as his predecessors.

What Darwin ascertained about the “origin of species” 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 intellectual faculties, shows that he is not familiar with the outcome of philosophy, that he has not emancipated himself from the vain wondering and its accompanying edification, 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 accomplished better things. Its errors have never been valueless, 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 understanding 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 transforms them into a hall of glory. Self-conscious limitation 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, describe, the whole world in a natural, sensible way. There is nothing that can resist it. But in the sense of a transcendental metaphysics, our understanding is not worthy 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 desire 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 divined, if not recognized, that the human soul is not a metaphysical thing, but a phenomenon. Like Professor Haeckel, they also complain about the dead classification in their specialty. The human soul is presented to them as a multitude of faculties. 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 connection?

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 splendid, 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 ideological separation of which it attempts just as do botany, zoology, and every other science 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 transcendental 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 speculation.

It is the business of metaphysics to treat being transcendentally. It is the business of special sciences to classify being after the manner of herbarium botany. Classical order is already present in the vegetable kingdom, otherwise no specialist in botany could classify it.

But the objective arrangement of the vegetable kingdom in infinitely more multiform than the subjective arrangement of botany. The latter is always excellent, if it corresponds to the scientific progress of its period. Whoever is looking for absolute botany or psychology, or for any other absolute science, misunderstands the universally natural character of the absolute as well as the relative special character of the human faculty of understanding.

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 remember throughout all their classifications according to departments 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.

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 information to register and to place his experience; thou shalt furthermore remain aware of thy liberty to progressively 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 are subject to continuous perfection.

Stable motion and mobile stability constitute the reconciling contradiction which enables us to reconcile all contradictions.

[1] E. g., given with his consciousness. - Editor

[2] By means of which we picture and explain the monistic interrelation of all things, called universe, nature and cosmos. - Editor

[3] That is, like all categories that are subdivisions of the absolute being, of general existence, pertaining only to the phenomena or specialties which, however, in their entirety constitute the absolute being or monistic nature.- Editor

Table of Contents

Preface

I. Positive Knowledge as a Special Object

II. The Power Of cognition Is Kin to the Universe

III. As to How the Intellect Is Limited and Unlimited

IV. The Universality of Nature

V. The Understanding as a Part of the Human Soul

VI. Consciousness Is endowed With the Faculty of Knowing as Well as With the Feeling of The Universality of All Nature

VII. The Relationship or Identity of Spirit and Nature

VIII. Understanding Is Material

IX. The Four Principles of Logic

X. The Function of Understanding on the Religious Field

XI. The Distinction Between Cause and Effect Is One of the Means of Understanding

XII. Mind and Matter: Which Is Primary, Which Secondary?

XIII. The Extent to Which the Doubts of the Possibility of Clear and Accurate Understanding Have Been Overcome

XIV. Continuation of the Discussion on the Difference Between Doubtful and Evident Understanding

Conclusion

Footnotes