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.