Part 17

I am endeavoring to make clear to you that logical thinking requires the awakening of the consciousness of the one supreme general nature. And you must not think of this sum of all existence in the stupid way in which people used to think of the animal kingdom before Darwin, but regard the world as a living organic unit, from which the faculty of understanding has blossomed the same as all other things. In the logic of the narrow-minded, all animal species are widely separated, without any living interconnection, while Darwin has demonstrated the uniform process, the intermingling life in multiform creation. The illustration of this famous zoologist of the transition from one species to another may serve as an example of the logical transitions in the world process, in which all differences are but undulations. All our classifications must always remember the undivided basis on which they are resting.

We have shown that the intellect divides the universal nature, classifies and analyzes it, and we have learned of the universal nature that it not only furnishes to the intellect the material for its work, but also that the world comprises within its general process the intellectual process, that the intellectual movement is a specialization of the natural movement.

The world is not only the object, but also the subject of understanding, it understands, it dissects its own multiplicity by means of the human intellect. Our wisdom is world wisdom in a two-fold sense: The world is that which is being understood, classified, analyzed, and at the same time it is that which, by the help of our intellect, practices understanding, classification, etc. When I call the human mind the cosmic mind, the mind of the supreme being, I wish to have it understood that there is nothing mysterious about this, that I merely intend to show that thought or intelligence can only operate in the universal cosmic interconnection, that it is not an abnormal and transcendental thing, but a thing like all other things.

You must not conceive of the spirit as the producer of truth, as a little god, but only as a means. The true god, the divine truth, has our intellect for an attribute. The latter does not produce truth, but only the understanding of truth. It produces only pictures of truth which are all more or less perfect. Of course, it is not at all immaterial whether we produce a more or less faithful, a true or a false picture of truth, but still this is, at present and for us here, a secondary matter. The main thing is to know that truth, or nature, is far above all pictures, and still consists of parts, of forms, which together constitute the whole.

FOOTNOTE:

[6] Please note the additional explanation on page 77.--EDITOR.

ELEVENTH LETTER

Dear Eugene:

Johannes Scherr relates in the "Gartenlaube," a German family paper, in an article entitled "Mahomet and His Work," that insane doctrinarians are searching for people without religion. This has not succeeded, it is said, although the spark of religious feeling is glowing very dimly in peoples that are close to the animal. But nevertheless, he continues, the expressions of religious feeling mark the boundary line where the beast ceases and man begins. For just as in the higher stages of civilization religion means the consciousness of the finite of being one with the infinite, so in the lower stages of civilization the indefinite impulse is felt by man to connect his special nature with the universal nature and bring them into harmony. This is idealism, the idealistic need. It is obvious that, and why, the people have always and everywhere sought and found satisfaction for their idealistic longings in religion. But, adds the shrewd observer, I must remark that I do not refer to the shifting population when I say "people," for sad to relate, that population is torn away from all connection with natural conditions. I refer to the "settled, the permanent, the true people."

This quotation shows that a champion of the "true people" is in conflict with true logic. In dividing a population into shifting and settled people, one should retain as a basis the logical consciousness that all classes of people are embraced by one class; furthermore, that human, monkey, ant, and other nations are parts of the one and the same nation; until finally man and animal, real and imaginary, with all religious and godless things, are ultimately fused in the world unit and can never be "torn away from all connection with natural conditions."

All distinctions must logically be based on the consciousness of the absolute and universal unity, of the interconnection of all things. For this reason some pious people, with their God in whom everything is living and has its being, have more logic than some freethinkers of the class of Johannes Scherr who have no coherence in their method of thought. The faithful think more logically than the narrowly skeptical, for they begin and end with God. But still they cannot think quite logically, because they cannot establish any logical connection between their eternally perfect Lord and evil, the devil, disease, misery, sin, in short all the sufferings and vanities here below.

The unit of nature, the infinite, is the quintessence of logic. Neither natural science in the narrow sense of the word, nor metaphysics, nor formal logic, can give any clue as to the nature of this thing of things. This can be done only by a science of understanding which recognizes matter and mind and all opposites and contradictions as formalities of the universe. How can a man who is out of touch with the mass of the shifting population feel that he is one with the universe? Whoever regards any special class as the true people, has no understanding either of the common people or of the absolute universe.

Proletarian logic teaches not only the equality of all human beings, but universal equality. And mark well, this universal equality does not conflict with variety any more than a variety of pots and jugs conflicts with the unity of vessels, or the manifold forms of bretzels and rolls with the unity of bakery ware.

The enemies of democratic development, in attacking the idea of freedom and equality, point to the manifoldness of nature, the individual differences of men, the distinctions between weak and strong, wise and fools, men and women, and consider it tyranny to attempt to equalize that which nature has made different. They cannot understand that like things may be different and different things alike. They are blinded by their class logic which sees only the differences, but not the unity, not the transfusion of all classes.

Class logic teaches that contradictory things cannot exist. According to it, a thing cannot be genuine and false at the same time. This class logic has a narrow conception of existence. It has only observed that there are many different things in nature, but has overlooked the fact that all these things have also a general nature. We, on the other hand, recognize that every thing, every person, is a part of the infinite world and partakes of its general nature, is eternal and perishable, true and untrue, great and small, one sided and manyfold, in short contradictory.

Before and after Socrates, philosophy and religion have searched for the genuine, right, good, true, and beautiful, but have reached no harmonious results. But it cannot be denied that in the course of the centuries the problem has become clearer and clearer. The great names of Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Cartesius, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, are milestones on the highway of this progress. The evolution is apparent, but the interrelation between the intellectual and physical, and especially between intellectual and economic evolution, is much ignored. The bridge between mind and body was not found, and philosophical evolution has been regarded up to our day as a purely mental process accomplished by one or two dozen of famous brains. I wish to point out to you now, that proletarian logic is the continuation of the preceding research after the genuine, true, good, and beautiful. It teaches how to conceive of these ideals logically, and it has not so much proceeded from any one talented brain, but is rather the product of the entire cosmic process.

Philosophical brains have developed the science of logical thought only to the extent that the material development of the world has stimulated them to do so. You must regard the human brains only as secondary levers of the universal lever which is not only genuine, true, good, and beautiful, but truth, goodness, and beauty itself, or the world and the absolute.

The understanding of the absolute which is called "good Lord," and then again "the bad world," in other words the selfsufficient cosmos, is very inconvenient to the wisdom of the professors, and they are attempting to assign it to a special study which they call "metaphysics." This division of labor is not introduced for the purpose of making research more productive, but of surrounding this study by mysterious darkness. The professors who lecture to the young people on formal logic set aside the ancient research after the true, the good, the beautiful, and try to place these ideals outside of the light of science in order to be able to preserve them unchanged in the tabernacle of faith.

This charge may seem unjust, because the learned gentlemen reserved a corner for the true, the good, and the beautiful in their metaphysical department. But there is something peculiar about this. The great Kant has asked the plain question: "Is metaphysics practicable as a science?" Answer: No! The transcendental truth, etc., sought by metaphysics, and named God, freedom, immortality in Christian language, cannot be found by any reason. But being a child of his time, the great philosopher makes a small concession to the transcendental.

He teaches: Although transcendental truth cannot be located scientifically, still the religious faith in its existence is wholesome. We, in our time, think more soberly about this theory of salvation and accept the elimination of all transcendentalism from science. While the spokesmen of the "true people" would like to hide their exalted truth, freedom, and immortality behind the curtains of temples, we throw the full daylight of logic on the absolute truth, goodness, and beauty of the material world.

Logic as the science of correct thought cannot be restricted to any one object, it cannot exclude any object, whether terrestrial or heavenly, from its sphere. The great lights of present day learning do not wish to subordinate the intellect as the object of the logical department, and absolute truth as the object of the metaphysical department, to one another, but to co-ordinate them side by side.

But two co-ordinated things which are not subordinated to a third higher thing lack logic, and the brain which is satisfied by such a condition suffers from disorder. Logical truth must inevitably be a part of absolute truth, and it is our duty to remove absolute truth from the field of metaphysics, of transcendentalism, and to transfer it to the sober world which forms an inseparable unit with the human mind.

So much for the proletarian duty to continue the research after the true, the good, and the beautiful which was the object of the philosophers before and after Socrates. But remember that I am referring only to the truly good, beautiful, etc., which is contained in the universal truth of all true specifications. The question of the ethically good, the esthetically beautiful and the absolutely perfect is as necessarily contained in the question of the universal truth as red, blue, and green in the rainbow, of course only in an abstract sense.

Our logic which has for its object the truth of the universe, is the science of the understanding of the universe, a science of universal understanding or conception of the world. It teaches that the interrelation of all things is truth and life, is the genuine, right, good, and beautiful. All the sublime moving the heart of man, all the sweet stirring his breast, is the universal nature or the universe. But the vexing question still remains: What about the negative, the ugly, the evil, what about error, pretense, standstill, disease, death, and the devil?

True, the world is vain, evil, ugly. But these are merely accidental phenomena, only forms and appendages of the world. Its eternity, truth, goodness, beauty, is substantial, existing, positive. Its negative is like the darkness which serves to make the light more brilliant, so that it may overcome the dark and shine so much more brightly.

The spokesmen of the ruling classes are not open for such a sublime optimism, because they have the pessimistic duty of perpetuating misery and servitude.

TWELFTH LETTER

Logic, the science of correct thought, demands in the first place true, or in other words, reasonable thought. Logic deals with reason and truth.

These two things have been endowed with a mysterious nature, while they obviously belong to the entire universe and its tangible nature. Reason and truth are not separated from the other things, are not things in themselves. There is no such thing. Philosophers who have looked for them in the depths of the human brain with their hands over their eyes and engaged in brown study, were on the wrong road. Proletarian logic differs from conventional logic in that it does not look for reason and truth behind the curtains of temples, nor in the brains of the learned, but it discovers them in the actual interconnection of all things and processes of nature.

Preachers, professors, judges, and politicians are the leaders of "the wise men of Gotham," and since we have all passed our youth among them, we find it difficult to get rid of their confused logic.

We owe much of our better insight to the famous philosophers. These men had many an eccentric notion, but on the whole they were reasonable fellows who followed the doctrine of the unreliability of the senses and the faith in the hidden truth and reason more in a theoretical than in a practical way. In practice they operated with open eyes and ears. Thus correct logic, although confused by queer notions, has been handed down to us from generation to generation. Preachers, professors, judges, and politicians cling to the confused notions, while we take the liberty to discard them.

Now we recognize not only that reason and truth are connected with the world, but also that the universe is the supreme reason and truth, is that being which religion and philosophy have long been looking for, the most perfect being, which Plato called the true, good and beautiful, Kant God, freedom, and immortality, and Hegel the absolute.

If he is an atheist who denies that perfection can be found in any individual, then I am an atheist. And if he is a believer in God who has the faith in the "most perfect being" with which not alone the theologists, but also Cartesius and Spinoza have occupied themselves so much, then I am one of the true children of God.

The abuse of sublime feelings and exalted ideas has filled many hearts with disgust, so that they care no longer for any unctuous sermons. The mere flavor of religion is odious to them. Nevertheless I assure you that we shall never get rid of idol worship, unless we understand the supreme being, reason or truth, in its true nature.

"Understand" is a mysterious word. To bring light into the mystery of understanding by a clear theory of understanding, is an integral part of the science of thought, of logic.

Permit me to compare the faculty of understanding with a photographic apparatus, by the help of which you strive to obtain a picture of the cosmic truth. Then you will see at a glance that in this way we can obtain but a dim picture of the whole. The object appears boundless, too infinitely great and sublime to permit of copying. And yet we can approach it. Although we cannot get a true picture of universal truth, yet we can obtain clear pictures of individual truths, in other words, we can picture the infinite in its parts. By the help of your intellect, you can grasp the infinite by means of limitation.

Absolute truth appears to us in relative phenomena. The perfect being is composed of imperfect parts. A "wise man of Gotham" may regard this as a senseless contradiction. But we can separate the arms, legs, head, and trunk from one another, and so separated they will be mere parts of a corpse, while connected they certainly possess the chance of vitality. Life is composed of the dead, the most perfect being is composed of imperfect parts. In the universal truth everything is contained. It is the perfect being, it includes the whole existence, even the imperfect. The false, the ugly, the evil, the nasty are involved in the true, the good, the beautiful. The universal existence is the absolute truth, the whole is composed of relativities, of parts, of phenomena. Our understanding, our instrument of thought, is likewise an imperfect part of the perfect being. Our intellect produces only a dim, imperfect picture of the absolute, but it reproduces true pictures of its parts, although pictures only.

There are good and bad, adequate and inadequate, true and false thoughts and understanding. But there are no absolutely true thoughts. All our conceptions and ideas are imperfect pictures of the most perfect being which is inexhaustible in great things as in small things, as a whole and in parts. Every part of nature is a natural part of the infinite.

I repeat: All parts or things of this world have, apart from their imperfect nature as parts, also the world nature of the absolute being. They are imperfect perfections. Our intellect is no exception. The human mind is the only mind having the name of reason, and is the most perfect reason which can possibly exist. In the same way, the water of this earth is the non plus ultra of all water. The belief in another and different mind, in a monster mind, belongs to the same transcendental category as the belief in a celestial river without the nature of water flowing around the castle of Zion. Even the most perfect mind is nothing else, and cannot be anything else, but an imperfect part of the absolute world being.

The first thing a student of correct thought has to learn is to distinguish true thought from false thought, and for this purpose he must know above all that distinction must not be exaggerated. All differences can only be relative. The bad and the good pictures belong to the same family, and all families finally belong to the absolute, are individuals of the universe.

For the purpose of distinguishing true thoughts from false, it should be remembered that the true thought is only a part of the truth, a part which does not exaggerate its own importance, but subordinates itself to the absolute.

The following illustration may explain this. Although astronomy teaches that the earth revolves daily around its axis and that the sun is standing still, it nevertheless knows that the fixed state of the sun is only a relative truth, so that from a higher point of view both the earth and the sun are revolving. The consciousness of its relative truth alone makes the statement of the sun's standstill true. Again, when the farmer sees that the earth is fixed and that the sun is moving every day from East to West, he is mistaken only so far as he regards his standpoint as the whole truth, his farmers' knowledge for absolute knowledge. The knowledge of the absolute alone enables you to distinguish correctly between truth and error. Whoever sees the sun turning around the earth with the consciousness that this revolution is but a partial truth is not in error, but sees truly. The knowledge of the absolute truth clears up error and instructs us as to the method of correct thought. This thought makes us apt, humble, and tolerant in judging.

The "wisest of men" was very proud of his modesty in knowing that he knew nothing. His example may well be recommended to-day. Although we have learned a great deal, we know very little compared to the inexhaustible fountain of all wisdom, good mother nature. We learn every day, but we never learn all there is to learn. What was to the credit of Socrates, was his firm faith in the truth, his conviction of its existence, and his faith in the mission of the human intellect to search for truth.

On the contrary, the sophists confused and disputed everything. They frivolously flouted all truth and research. This same frivolousness now relies upon Kant who, misled by the prejudice of his time, removed truth to a transcendental world and therefore deprecatingly called our actual world the "world of phenomena." In distinction from him, our logic teaches that the phenomena of this world without exception are parts of the one truth, and that the true art of understanding consists in studying the parts.

The doctrine of the sophists to the effect that everything may be denied and disputed has a certain similarity with ours in that we declare that the universe is the truth and all parts of it true parts, that smoke and fog, reason and imagination, dreams and realities, subject and object, are true parts of the world. They are not the whole truth, but still true. For this reason it is well to call your attention to the difference between the sophistical and the logical method of thought. The contemporaries of Socrates are still alive to-day. They are teaching in the name of God and believe in nothing, while to us truth, every day naked and sober truth, is sacred.

THIRTEENTH LETTER

In his "Three Books On The Soul," Aristotle discussed at length the question whether the human soul has five senses or one. The commentator, J. H. von Kirchmann, the publisher of the "Philosophical Library," remarks in his footnote 172 that man has six senses. He divides feeling into pure and active feeling. According to this, the phrase of the five senses belongs to the old iron the same as that of the four elements. Now neither you, nor I, nor any reader should worry about the question whether all sensation may be summed up in the one sense of feeling, whether there are five senses according to Aristotle, or six according to Kirchmann, or whether there is even a seventh sense for the transcendental, the organ of which, as some optimists hope, will gradually be developed with the growing perfection of man. We are concerned in this matter only so far as it is connected with the cardinal question, whether the world is only one thing or a mere collection of an infinite number of disconnected things; whether the so-called things are independent subjects and objects, or whether they are only predicates of the one world subject.

Looking through the window I see the river, the street, the bridge, houses, and trees. Everything is a thing in itself and yet is connected inseparably with all others. The qualities of the world are regarded by the intellect as subjects; but the intelligent subject should also know that its actions, its distinguishing and understanding, are formalities, a formal dismemberment of the absolute, which in spite of all division always remains the undivided whole.

In order to master this method of thought, you must understand above all that the things are only so-called things, but are in reality qualities of the universe, in other words, relative things or predicates of the absolute. You will then understand, that our thought has a right to make one thing as well as six of a chair, its back, its seat, and its four legs. You will recognize that the five senses of Aristotle are not an eternal truth, but a classification, which is eternally variable. Distinguishing means classifying.