"Philosophy should not try to be edifying," said Hegel. This means that
religious feeling is far below scientific thought. But there is a
reverse side to this sentence, viz., that thoughts which do not rise to
the edifying interconnection of all things, no matter whether they
remain stuck in some specialty on account of frivolousness or of
narrowmindedness, are far below a wise world philosophy.
In a former letter I have already emphasized, and I hope to prove it
more convincingly, that the conception of "God," or of the absolute, is
indispensable for a logical world philosophy.
You know that in my dictionary the gods and divinities of all religions
and denominations are "idols," and justly so, since they are all
manufactured images. Instead of the entire universe, they worship a more
or less unessential part of it.
The religions show by their idolatry, the sciences frequently by their
little creditable indifference, that they have no conception of the
intellect and its art of reasoning.
The universe is a familiar conception. Everybody uses it, and there is
apparently little to say about it. But in fact it is the conception of
all conceptions, the being of all beings, the cause of itself which has
no other cause and no other being beside itself. That the whole world is
contained in the universe is so obvious that you may wonder at my waste
of words over such a matter-of-fact thing. But when you consider that
the people have always searched for a world cause outside of the world,
together with a beginning of the world and a transcendental truth, then
you will see that they have not grasped the conception of the world as a
whole, as a universe. And if that is admitted, then the proof that it is
the cause of all causes, the beginning of all beginnings, and the truth
of all truths, is not such a superfluous undertaking.
Now you may say that it is presumptuous to try to understand the whole
universe at once. This objection is justified in a way, according to the
interpretation of the words. Still I hope that it will be my
justification to declare that it is not a question of understanding the
universe in detail, but only in general, not each and everything in its
differentiation, but only in a summary way. And it is only the edifying
conception of the universe as a whole which will open for you the door
to the understanding of the human mind, of thought, and the art of using
it. We wish to understand _the_ conception; not this or that conception,
but the whole conception, the conception of the whole. You will no
longer indulge in the superstition that the faculty of thought or
understanding is a thing apart from the world's interconnection. I
presume that you have now learned enough about the art of thought to be
sure not to think of anything without its worldwide interrelation. For
so long as one imagines that a piece of wood or a stone is a thing in
itself, without connection with light and air, with Earth, Moon, and
Sun, he has a very barbarian conception of the things of this world.
I maintain that the understanding of the human faculty of reason and the
art of its use are inseparable from the world concept. And I want this
understood in the sense, that it is not a mistake to distinguish between
the internal mind and the outside world, but that these are merely
formal distinctions of the essentially indivisible and absolute
universe.
The concept of this true God or divine, because universal, Truth shows
on close analysis that it includes the special truth of the art of
thought as well as all other sciences, and pre-eminently the science of
thought, because this science must not limit itself to any special
thing, but must be world wisdom by its very will and nature.
To understand the universe, then, means to become aware that this being
of all beings has no beginning, no cause, no truth nor reason outside
and beside itself, but has everything in and by itself. To understand
the universe means to recognize that one is rushing beyond the worldly
infinity into the realm of fantastic transcendentalism and abusing the
intellect, when illogically applying such terms as beginning and end,
cause and effect, being and not being, to the absolute universe. Such an
illogical use of the faculty of thought is well illustrated and rebuked
by the poet who questions and answers:
"And when my life has passed away,
What will become of me?
The world has one eternal day,
'Thereafter' cannot be."
In order to acquire the universal sense, you will strive to understand
that the universe includes all relative things, while as a whole it
embodies the absolute or the edifying deity.
If you would become world-wise, you must learn that the things called
opposites and contradictions have a different meaning than is ordinarily
applied to them by the logic of the idolators. They say that God and the
world, body and soul, truth and error, life and death, etc., are
irreconcilable antipodes; that they exclude one another; that they
cannot be brought under the same roof, but must be kept wide apart by
the laws of eternal reason. But this doctrine of contradiction is merely
narrow dogmatism, which confuses the minds instead of enlightening them.
Certainly, death differs from life, the perishable from the
imperishable, black from white, crooked from straight, large from small.
Who would be silly enough to deny that? But even the apparently most
contradictory and opposite things may be classified under the same
genus, family, or species, as twins in a mother's womb. The same thing
that does not prevent male and female from sitting in the same nest,
does not prevent the most widely different things, in spite of their
separate characters, from being one and the same, from being two pieces
of the same caliber. You are certainly still the same Eugene that you
were as a little baby, and yet you are at the same time another. The
experts in physiology even claim that they can compute how often a man
of sixty has changed his flesh, bones, skin, and hair. Although the old
man is the same individual that he was when first born, yet he never
remained the same.
You will see by this illustration that all difference is of the same
nature, a general, supreme, universal being, absolute and divine, and
this absolute world being is highly edifying, because it comprises all
other beings and is the Alpha and Omega of all things.
Is this world-god a mere idea? No, it is the truth and life itself. And
it is very interesting to note that the so-called "ontological proof of
the existence of God" agrees very well with the world truth which I
proclaim in the tabernacle of logic. This proof is originally attributed
to the learned Anselmo of Canterbury. However that may be, it is certain
that Descartes and Spinoza support him with their famous names. They
hold that the "most perfect being" must necessarily have existence,
because otherwise it would not be the most perfect.
"I understood very well," writes Descartes in the fourth section of his
"Method of Correct Thought," "that in accepting the hypothesis of a
triangle I would have to accept the fact that the sum of its three
angles is equal to two right angles. But nothing convinced me of the
presence of such a triangle, while I found that my conception of the
most perfect being was as inseparably linked to existence as my
conception of a triangle is to the identity of the sum of its angles
with two right angles.... Hence it is certainly as undeniable as any
geometrical proof can be that God exists as this most perfect being."
This argument appears to me as clear as daylight and ought to convince
you, not of the existence of a transcendental idol, but of the truth of
the absolute and most perfect world being. If you were to remark that
this perfectness is not so very great, considering its many obvious
imperfections, I should ask you not to split hairs and to recognize with
sane senses that these imperfections of the world belong as logically to
the perfect world as the evil desires belong to virtue which becomes
virtue only by the test of overcoming them. The conception of a
perfection which has no imperfections to overcome would be a silly idea.
Now in conclusion let me say a few words of apology for continually
interchanging the universe and the concept of the universe. I frequently
speak of the idea of a thing as if it were the thing itself. But see
here! Do you not ask on seeing the portrait of some person unknown to
you: Who is this? And do you not interchange the portrait for the person
itself, without difficulty and misunderstanding? The idea stands in the
same relation to the thing, as the portrait to the person it represents.
This remark is directed against that unsound logic which knows only the
separation of the idea from the thing, of reason from its objects, but
does not grasp the mere formality of such a distinction, does not
appreciate the unity of the world, the edifying and supreme truth, the
truth of the supreme being.
This letter, my dear Eugene, pleads for edification, but only for that
kind of edification which includes the unedifying, whereby edification
is sobered down. If you would give the name of pantheism to this world
philosophy, you should remember that it is not a sentimental and
exalted, but a common sense pantheism, a deification which has the taste
of the godless.