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 Noire, "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.