Part 18

I know very well that I am making a bold statement here, and that it is not easy to justify it. For this reason you must not expect that I can make my meaning clear in a few sentences. It is not only the general prejudice which prevents this by making a most mysterious and miraculous thing of the intellectual function, but also the fact that this thing is still very obscure, although it has become clearer and clearer in the course of time.

The freethinking pastor Hironymi writes on this point: "The most prominent naturalists of the present, such as Dubois-Reymond, who are at the same time thinkers, admit that they do not know what feeling, life, consciousness, are, and how they arise. And this ignorance is far more valuable for truth and religion than the alleged knowledge. Let us, therefore, continue in the devotion with which we have hitherto admired the universe without understanding it. The higher existence, the consciousness, has not been explained, it has remained a miracle, the only lasting, absolute, miracle."

Thus speaks the preacher who is a know-nothing by nature and makes a business of admiring and wondering, while we are interested in understanding and knowing. We wish to fathom the mystery, and hence I may write still more letters on logic and you may study some more.

I shall try to demonstrate by a trivial example, how it is that understanding or distinguishing is based on classification.

Take it that you awake at early dawn and notice in a corner of your bed room something uncouth and moving which you cannot clearly distinguish. To know that a phenomenon appears is not enough because the term phenomenon applies to everything, natural and unnatural things, good and evil spirits. Even if you are sufficiently enlightened to know that the thing in question must be something natural, still this explains very little, for the term "nature" again means everything. But you understand or recognize more when you ascertain that the uncouth thing is dead or alive, wall paper or garment, man or animal. You will notice that in this intellectual enlightenment it is simply a matter of classification, of the head under which the mystery should be classed. To classify the phenomena of truth and life, means to understand, to use the intellect, to enlighten the brain.

But we must well consider how far we shall have to go in our classification in order to find the place in the system which will fully clarify and determine understanding. Suppose that in the above mentioned case you have ascertained that the motion is due to a cat, then the inquiring faculty of understanding has not yet reached the end of its tether. The next question is then, whether it is your cat or that of your neighbor, whether it is black, white, or grey, young or old. And when you finally recognize that it is your tomcat Peter, you must remember that the subject which understands as well as the object to be recognized, being parts of the absolute, are absolutely and infinitely divisible parts, which are never fully understood and never fully exhausted.

Please remember that in speaking of something uncouth, we are not so much concerned in Peter or Tabby, but in the intellect which we desire to understand so that we may make a correct use of it. And I refer to it as uncouth merely because its understanding is beset with so many difficulties. When I compared it in the preceding letter with a photographic apparatus which should furnish us with pictures, and in likening it now to an instrument designed to distinguish things by classification, I warn you not to be confused thereby. Classification is most essential as a means of producing intellectual pictures. In this connection I emphasize once more that the faculty of understanding, the same as other things, is not independent by itself, but can accomplish something only in the universal interconnection. The understanding that the phenomenon quoted above belongs to the category of tomcats, and more especially into the column labeled Peter, would not be any understanding at all, if you had not become previously acquainted with the mouse-devouring race and individual in question. Only in connection with your previous experience is the understanding that this tomcat and the uncouth motion are one and the same thing, or belong to the same category, a true understanding.

Ludwig Feuerbach says: A talented writer is recognized by the fact that he assumes talent on the part of the reader also and does not chew up his subject into minute parts like a petty schoolmaster. On the other hand, it seems to me that it is possible to assume too much, and I pursued a schoolmasterly course in this case, because the subject is new to you and still leaves plenty of room for reflection.

I wanted to show by a commonplace example what I mean by insight and understanding and how by means of it the unknown and uncouth becomes known and familiar. True, the understanding in this case was illumined by previous experience, while you are after new knowledge. You want to know how enlightenment arises in order to acquire new insight. Now, all novelty has the dialectic quality of being at the same time something antiquated. New understanding can be acquired only by the help of old understanding. In other words, old and new understanding, which I define here as the faculty of classification, have their existence only in the total interdependence of the universal existence.

You must discard the old prejudice that knowledge can be collected like cents. Although this is well enough, it does not suffice for the purpose of logical thinking. One science belongs to another, and all of them together belong to one class with the entire universe. It will be apparent to you, then, that at the beginning of your young days your knowledge has not sprouted all at once, but has come out of the unknown. And what is true of you, is true of the whole human race. In its cradle it was without intellect. It had, indeed, the germ. But do not beasts, worms, and sensitive plants have that also? In short, the light of perception and understanding is nothing new in the radical sense of the word, but connected with the old and with the world in general, and of the same kind. All our knowledge must be connected and combined into one understanding, one system, one realm, and this is the realm of reality, of truth, of life.

Systematic classification is the task of logic. The first requirement for this purpose is the awakened consciousness of the indivisibility of the universe, of its universal unity. This consciousness is, in other words, at the same time the recognition of the merely formal significance of all scientific classification.

The unity of the universe is true, and is the sole and innate truth. That this sole world truth is full of differences, is just as absolutely different as absolutely the same, does no more contradict a reasonable unity and equality than there is any contradiction in the fact that the various owls have different faces and still the same owl face.

Aristotle divided the sense into five parts, anthropologists the race of man into five races, natural philosophers the space into three dimensions. It is now a question of showing to you that such a division, however true and just, is nevertheless far from being truth and justice, but is merely classification. The fundamental requirement of logic is to designate scientific classifications as that which they are, viz., mental operations. It is the business of the intellect to make classifications. That is its characteristic quality and does not contradict the indivisible truth in the least.

Old wiseacres teach that a reasonable man must not contradict himself, and this is a wise, though very narrow, lesson. Hegel maintains that everything in the world is reasonable, hence the contradictions are also. Under this conservative exterior there is hidden a very revolutionary perception of which the "destructive" minds take advantage in order to flatly contradict the wiseacres and their stable, dead, disordered order which cannot stand any contradiction.

Reason dissolves all contradictions and opposition into harmony by logical classification. "Everything in its own time and place." If it does not wish to be called unreason, reason must rise to the understanding that its opposite is only a formal antagonism. It must know that God and the world, body and soul, life and death, motion and rest, and whatever else the dualists may distinguish, are two and yet one. Then it becomes clear that the conservatives are the real revolutionaries, because by their senseless adherence to the "good old order" they drive the proletariat to desperation, until it upsets that order. On the other hand, the maligned revolutionaries are conservative, because they subordinate themselves to the world's evolutionary process which was, is, and will be eternal.

The red thread winding through all these letters deals with the following points: The instrument of thought is a thing like all other common things, a part or attribute of the universe. It belongs particularly to the general category of being and is an apparatus which produces a detailed picture of human experience by categorical classification or distinction. In order to use this apparatus correctly, one must fully grasp the fact that the world unit is multiform and that all multiformity is a unit.

It is the solution of the riddle of the ancient Eleatic philosophy: How can the one be contained in the many, and the many in one?

FOURTEENTH LETTER

Shoemaking and beet culture are as much sciences as physics, chemistry, and astronomy. Reading, writing, and reckoning are called elementary knowledge, and though I do not deny that they have an elementary value for the culture of the mind, yet I can truly say that I have met well-informed people who could neither read nor write. I wish to indicate by this that there are indeed high and low degrees of knowledge and science, but that such graduations have only a temporary, local, relative, subjective significance, while in the absolute all things are the same.

The scorn with which you may hear some people speak of the night of the absolute in which all cats are grey and all women beautiful Helenas shall not prevent us from repeatedly studying the absolute which I have again and again praised as the main topic of logic. Only remember, please, that you must not have any mystic idea of it. The absolute is the sum total of all that was, is, and will be.

The subjects as well as the objects of all science belong to the absolute, which is commonly called "world."

All other sciences have for their object limited parts, relative matters, while the science of the mind treats of all things, of the infinite. This is a point to which I refer frequently because it tends to make my lessons obscure. I am lecturing on the science of the intellect, but I speak of all things, of the universe, because I am obliged to demonstrate, not the relation of the mind to shoemaking or astronomy, but its general interrelations. I have to make plain its general conduct, and this leads necessarily to the all-embracing generality, to the absolute. We wish to learn the art of thinking, not on this or that subject, but the art of general world thought.

The intellect is a special part, the same as every other scientific or practical object. But it is that part which is not satisfied with piece work, which knows that it itself and all special things are attributes or predicates of the absolute subject, that it itself and all things are universally interrelated.

The human mind is sometimes called self-consciousness. But this name is too limited for such an unlimited thing, for the pathfinder of the infinite, for your, my, and every other consciousness of the world and of existence in general.

For centuries the question has been discussed whether there are innate ideas hidden in the intellect or whether it may be likened to a blank paper which experience impregnates with knowledge. This is the question after the origin and source of understanding. Whence comes reason, where do we get our ideas, judgments, conclusions? By the help of brown-study from the interior of our brain, from revelation, or from experience? It seems to me that you will quickly decide this matter when I ask you to consider that everything we experience, together with the intellect going through experiences, is a revelation of the absolute. Everything we know is experience. We may consider the mind as a sheet of blank paper, but in order that it may receive writing on its surface this internal paper is as necessary as the external world which produces the hand, the pen and the ink for this process of writing. In other words, all experience originates from the world organism. Not knowledge, but consciousness, world consciousness, is innate in the intellect. It has not the consciousness of this or that in itself, but it knows of itself the general, the existence as such, the absolute.

The science of the intellect has ever wrestled with one peculiar fact. It found knowledge which the mind had received from the outside, so-called empirical knowledge. But it also found knowledge which was innate, so-called _a priori_ knowledge. That there is always a valley between two mountains, that gold is not sheet iron, that the part is smaller than the whole, that the angles of a triangle are together equal to two right angles, that circles are round, that water is wet, that fire is hot, etc., these are things of which we know that they are true in heaven and in hell, and in all time to come, although we have never been there with our experience. This plainly shows that we harbor a secret in our brains which the lovers of the mystical seek to exploit by making believe that their self-interested wisdom of God and high authority likewise belongs to the eternally innate truths. For this reason it is especially important for the proletariat to bring the controversy of the origin and source of understanding to a close.

Our logic asks: Does wisdom descend mysteriously from the interior of the human brain, or does it come from the outer world like all experience? We shall leave its descent from heaven out of the question.

The answer is: Science, perception, understanding, thought, require internal and external things, subject and object, brain and world. Truth is here and truth is there. Truth is so divine that it is everywhere and absolute.

But how to explain that wonderful _a priori_ knowledge which exceeds all experience? For it is a fact that the intellect has not alone the faculty of knowing things in general, but also that of separating them into their parts and from one another and to name them. It cuts off slices, so to say. But not like the butcher who sees everything merely from the standpoint of his trade. You will remember from your own experience as well as from my repeated statements that the world is not a monotonous, but a multiform unit. This confused knot is dissolved and explained by intellectual separation, by classification. In the absolute everything is alike and unlike. But the intellect makes abstractions from the unlike. For instance, in conceiving of the term minerals, we pass over the distinction between gold and sheet iron. Then, when we continue the classification by subordinating gold and sheet iron as separate species to the general term of minerals, we know very well that gold and sheet iron are different kinds of the same general mineral nature. We know what the names indicate, and so long as they retain their meaning, we know that neither in heaven nor in hell can gold be sheet iron or sheet iron be gold. Water and fire are specialties taken from the universe and named. Is it a wonder, then, that these names have a special meaning and that we have the settled conviction that wherever sense instead of nonsense is master, fire burns, water wets, circles are round, and the sum of the angles of every triangle is equal to two right angles?

These illustrations are commonplace enough, indeed, but it seems to me that they clearly show the mere formality of the distinction between innate and experienced knowledge. You will recognize that both of these kinds of knowledge are different and yet of the same kind, that both are mixtures of the internal and external. Knowledge _a priori_ ceases to be a miracle when we understand that it comes out of the same fountain of experience as _a posteriori_ knowledge, and in either case knowledge is acquired only by means of the intellect. Hence intellect connected with the world is the sole source of all wisdom, and external nature as well as our internal faculty of understanding are parts of the one general nature, which is the truth and the absolute.

"Only a gradual, slow, gapless development," says Noiré, "can free the thinking mind from the philosophical disease of wondering."

The art of dialectics or logic which teaches that the universe, or the whole world, is one being, is the science of absolute evolution. "In the whole constitution of all natural things," writes Lazare Geiger, "there is hardly anything more miraculous than the way in which the miracle avoids our glance and continuously withdraws into the distance to escape observation. In the place of the abrupt and strange things produced by imagination, reason puts uniformity and transition."

And we add that the science of reason, or logic, teaches simultaneously with the unity of the whole world, also that all things are alike miraculous, or that there is only one miracle, which is existence in general, the absolute. In other words, everything and nothing is miraculous.

In demonstrating that the most different things, such as heat and cold, and all radical distinctions, are only relative forms of universal nature, I prove the uninterrupted and matter of fact transition and the absolute graduality, the fusion, of all things.

I have tried to establish this proof in regard to the two kinds of knowledge and illustrated it with commonplace examples, because these have a popularizing effect. In order to meet the demands of more exacting minds, I shall presently take up the miracle of causality. The indubitable statement that everything must have its cause is regarded as the most miraculous innate knowledge, and is much misused for the purpose of bringing confusion into logic.

FIFTEENTH LETTER

My Son:

If on my return from some voyage I were to tell you of all the things I have _not_ seen, you would justly doubt the order of my senses. Sane reason demands that the description of unfamiliar things be given in a positive, not in a negative manner. If that is so, is it not wrong to proceed negatively by trying to prove in explaining the nature of the intellect that it is not a miracle and no mysterious charm of wisdom? I answer: No. For the present, the intellect is still a sort of _ignis fatuus_ which is magnified into a fiery man. In order to understand the _ignis fatuus_, it is necessary to remove the fiery man. Logic must show that human reason is not a miracle, not a mystical receptacle of wisdom. The negative process is in such a case positively in order. Wherever a thing is obscured by prejudices, these must first be removed, in order that room may be made for the bare fact.

It was the famous Kant who posed the question: "How is _a priori_ knowledge possible?" How do we arrive at the knowledge of things which are not accessible to experience? The answer is that the intellect cannot accomplish such a miracle, and Kant substantiates this in a long-winded way and with admirable penetration. But he left a nasty hair in the soup.

He found that by the help of our reason we can explain only phenomena. The confusion between truth and phenomena had been handed down to him as an infirmity of ancient times. He worked diligently on its solution, but left some work for those coming after him. Originally the study of supernatural and the profane study of natural things were closely intermingled. Not until the obvious results of natural science became known, did thinkers accommodate themselves to the habit of leaving supernatural things to faith and limiting science to the study of natural phenomena. Science had so to say passed on to the practical order of business, not paying any further attention to the contrast between phenomena and truth. But the logic, which is innate in the human mind, cannot content itself with the dualistic split between faith and science. It demands a monistic system and does not desist until the primeval forests of faith are completely put under cultivation.

The logical impulse of culture caused Kant to continue what was begun by Socrates. Philosophy before Socrates searched for truth externally. While our logic teaches that everything is true, and truth is the universe, the Ionic philosophers made a sort of fetish out of the matter. Thales idolized the water as the thing of things, another the fire, a third numbers. This worship of the fetish was the worship of truth. The search for understanding starts out with misunderstanding. From religious to scientific culture, it is a step, not a leap. When Socrates turned to introspection and started out, with his "Know thyself," in submitting the prodigy of the human soul to critique, he made another important step.

You know that the "wisest of men" was not interested in air and water, in natural science of the strict order, but rather in the good, the true, and the beautiful, in the human in the narrower sense, in the realm of the spirit, in the soul. It was indeed unwise that he was interested to the verge of idolization, since in consequence of this interest in a special part, the other, the material part was being neglected. According to Goethe's statement that one thing is not fit for all, Socrates did right. He and all philosophical lights after him studied the intellect. What they missed was the now dawning understanding that the faculty of thought is not a prodigy but a special, and at the same time common, part of universal nature. While these philosophers looked for truth in any one special form of excellence, you are now invited to look for it in the total interrelation of things.

Science has ever endeavored to do away with miracles and prodigies. This could be accomplished only gradually, and the logicians have, therefore, remained more or less biased and confused. The great Kant was no exception. He looked for supreme truth, and for its sake he investigated the intellect. He is celebrated because he explained so well that this intellect feels no mission for anything transcendental, and cannot understand anything but phenomena. Still he permitted something transcendental to remain.

Kant is of the opinion that we perceive things as they appear, but not as they are "in themselves." Nevertheless we should believe that a mysterious truth is at the bottom of those phenomena, because we should otherwise arrive at the irreconcilable contradiction that there are phenomena without anything which could appear. The intellect, he holds, can operate only on the field of phenomena, and for this reason we should give up the endless grubbing after the transcendental. But we should leave one little room in the house of reason, one little chamber of faith, which points beyond experience up to the point where a mysterious truth guards God and His commands.